Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Okta VS Keycloak

Compare Okta VS Keycloak and see what are their differences

Okta logo Okta

Enterprise-grade identity management for all your apps, users & devices

Keycloak logo Keycloak

Open Source Identity and Access Management for modern Applications and Services.
  • Okta Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-11
  • Keycloak Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-20

Okta features and specs

  • Comprehensive Identity Management
    Okta provides a full suite of identity management solutions, including Single Sign-On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Lifecycle Management to ensure secure and efficient identity management.
  • Ease of Integration
    Okta supports integration with thousands of apps and services, ensuring that you can easily incorporate it into your existing IT ecosystem.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The platform has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that simplifies the setup and management of user identities, making it accessible for administrators with varying technical skills.
  • High Security Standards
    Okta employs strong authentication methods and security protocols, helping to ensure that your organization’s identities and data are well protected against threats.
  • Scalability
    Okta is designed to scale with your organization, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises.
  • Excellent Customer Support
    Okta is known for providing high-quality customer support through various channels, including phone, email, and an extensive knowledge base.

Possible disadvantages of Okta

  • Cost
    The cost of Okta can be relatively high compared to some other identity management solutions, which might be a concern for smaller businesses with tight budgets.
  • Complexity for Small Organizations
    Some smaller organizations may find Okta's extensive range of features to be more complex than they need, potentially leading to underutilization of the platform.
  • Dependency on Internet Connectivity
    As a cloud-based service, Okta requires reliable internet connectivity. Any disruption in internet service can affect access to the Okta platform and its associated functionalities.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, there can be a learning curve associated with understanding and fully leveraging all of Okta’s features and capabilities.
  • Custom Development Needs
    While Okta offers an extensive range of pre-built integrations, organizations with very specific requirements may need to invest in custom development to achieve full functionality.

Keycloak features and specs

  • Open-Source
    Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management solution, which means it is free to use and has a community-driven support system. This can lead to lower costs and more flexibility compared to proprietary solutions.
  • Feature-Rich
    Keycloak offers a comprehensive set of features including single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), user federation, identity brokering, and social login. This makes it suitable for a wide range of use cases.
  • Customizability
    With Keycloak, you can customize the authentication and authorization processes through its extensible architecture, allowing for the addition of custom features and integrations.
  • Integration Capability
    Keycloak supports integration with various protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML, making it versatile for integrating with different platforms and services.
  • Active Community
    Keycloak has an active and growing community of developers and users who contribute to its improvement and provide support, resources, and shared knowledge.

Possible disadvantages of Keycloak

  • Complexity
    Keycloak can be complex to set up and configure, especially for users who are not familiar with identity and access management concepts. This may require additional time and expertise.
  • Resource-Intensive
    Running Keycloak can be resource-intensive, requiring more CPU and memory compared to simpler authentication solutions. This may necessitate higher infrastructure costs.
  • Learning Curve
    The learning curve for Keycloak can be steep for new users due to its wide range of features and configuration options. Ample time might be required to fully understand and utilize its capabilities.
  • Documentation Quality
    While Keycloak has extensive documentation, some users find it to be insufficiently detailed or difficult to navigate, which can impede the setup and troubleshooting process.
  • Maintenance
    Operating a Keycloak instance involves ongoing maintenance tasks such as updates, security patches, and backups, which can be time-consuming and require dedicated resources.

Okta videos

Okta | What Does Okta Do?

More videos:

  • Review - Okta | What Is Okta?
  • Review - Okta User Experience

Keycloak videos

What is Keycloak and what are the main features | DevNation Live

More videos:

  • Review - Keycloak Overview
  • Review - Easily Secure Your Front and Back End app with Keycloak

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Okta and Keycloak)
Identity And Access Management
Identity Provider
71 71%
29% 29
SSO
70 70%
30% 30
Two Factor Authentication

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Okta and Keycloak

Okta Reviews

Top 7 Firebase Alternatives for App Development in 2024
Okta is ideal for large-scale applications and enterprises with complex identity requirements.
Source: signoz.io
Top 10 Best SAML Identity Providers List for SSO (Pros and Cons)
Okta is one of the popular cloud solutions that allow SSO vendors to easily access cloud and on site applications via any device, from anywhere at any time with the use of robust security policies. Able to directly integrate with 4000+ applications and also existing directories and identity solutions a company uses. Primarily integrates every service that offers SAML.
12 User Authentication Platforms [Auth0, Firebase Alternatives]
Okta is again a flagbearer of password-less security. However, you can ask for the strongest passwords with Okta as well.
Source: geekflare.com
Top 11 Identity & Access Management Tools
Okta is a development tool for backend user identity and a workforce management solution. It is a flexible system that aims to be a one-stop solution for all IAM needs. Currently, Okta falls short on passwordless solutions, prompting users to change their passwords often. In addition, users also report some technical issues with logins.
Source: spectralops.io
Best identity access management software 2022
Okta enables organizations to secure and manage their extended enterprise, whether on-premises or in a private, public or hybrid cloud. With more than 6,000 pre-built integrations to applications and infrastructure providers, Okta claims that its customers can securely adopt the technologies they need to fulfil their missions. Okta provides SSO (single sign-on), MFA...
Source: www.zdnet.com

Keycloak Reviews

12 User Authentication Platforms [Auth0, Firebase Alternatives]
You can integrate Keycloak with your applications to have a single-sign-in and single-sign-out experience. Moreover, one can activate social logins without any modification in code. Additionally, it allows user authentication via existing OpenID Connect or SAML 2.0
Source: geekflare.com
10+ Open-source Single-Sign On (SSO) Solutions
Keycloak is a free, open-source identity and access management system with highly configurable Single-Sign-On (SSO) support.
Source: medevel.com
10 Best Auth0 Alternatives and Similar Platforms
Keycloak may be quite beneficial because it provides a built-in method for syncing with databases, such as LDAP or Active Directory, when your users already are registered on. If you use Social Login for social platforms such as Facebook, Keycloak might be a great tool for your organization.
Top 5 Open Source Single Sign-On Software In the Year 2021
KeyCloak is another free software that is based on OpenID Connect, OAuth2.0, and SAML2.0. It provides SSO capabilities across web applications and web services. Above all, this open source software provides integrations with LDAP and Active Directory. There is a logical user interface where users can manage roles, permissions, and sessions. Moreover, this free solution...
IAM: A comparison of open-source tools
/ Digitalberry news / IAM: A comparison of open-source toolsIAM: A comparison of open-source toolsWhy use an Identity Provider (IdP)?Comparative study of Identity Providers (IdP)1. Our team’s first choice: Keycloak2. In second place of our comparative study: Gluu3. Special mention: FusionAuthDiscover our expertiseContact our experts

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Okta should be more popular than Keycloak. It has been mentiond 7 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Okta mentions (7)

  • Are millions of accounts vulnerable due to Google's OAuth Flaw?
    Sign up for an Employee Identity Solution (IdP) that provides OAuth, there are actually many solutions here, Google Workspace, Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Ping Identity. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • How to use PassportJS for authentication in NodeJS
    The majority of the codebases I've worked on over the years have always favoured using JSON web-tokens (JWT) or Authentication-as-a-Service platforms (Auth0, Okta etc) for authentication logic. These are indeed excellent choices! however, on smaller projects I find these to always seem to be overkill. Recently I started working on a chrome extension that performs social sign-in using twitter OAuth API and... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Millennials, what confuses you about Gen Z?
    This happened to me three days ago! A new employee had trouble logging into our intranet, which is at OurCompanyName.okta.com. He was going to okta.com. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Access Control System (ACS) Architecture
    Maybe go to okta.com , they have some cool solutions, might give you some ideas. Source: over 3 years ago
  • GameStop knows. DRS 💜
    Okta.com is being used by gamestop to power the login to the creator platform. their favicon is a dark blue circle. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

Keycloak mentions (4)

  • Beyond the login page
    Most of the time nowadays, I prefer offloading this to an identity provider, using OpenID Connect or soon Federated Credential Management (FedCM), even if that means shipping an identity provider as part of the deliverables (I generally go with Keycloak, with keycloak-config-cli to provision its configuration). I'm obviously biased though as I work in IT services, developping software mainly for... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Okta Says Hackers Stole Data for All Customer Support Users
    Yet another breach of Okta... Why are companies not running something like keycloak [1] themselves? Are administrative/maintenance costs too high or is it plausible deniability? [1] https://keycloak.org. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • I built a ready-to-use auth server with TypeScript and Express.js
    I'd stick with a solution like https://keycloak.org in that instance. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Authelia is an open-source authentication/authorization server with 2FA/SSO
    A few more projects in this space: - Keycloak (you won't get fired for picking this)[0] - CloudFoundry's UAA[1] - Gluu [2] - Keratin [3] - OpenUnison [4] - Dex[5] - Netlify's GoTrue[6] All of these solutions are a bit different but here are some of the axes: - Whether or not they function as an OAuth provider - Whether they're centered around application-user-login (email + password) or application auth (OAuth) or... - Source: Hacker News / about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Okta and Keycloak, you can also consider the following products

Auth0 - Auth0 is a program for people to get authentication and authorization services for their own business use.

OneLogin - On-demand SSO, directory integration, user provisioning and more

Microsoft Azure Active Directory - Azure Active Directory is a comprehensive identity and access management cloud solution that provides a robust set of capabilities to manage users and groups and help secure access to applications including Microsoft online services like Office 365 …

Amazon Cognito - Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your web and mobile apps quickly and easily. It scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.

Ping Identity - Ping Identity provides cloud-based, single sign-on and identity management solutions with their SAML SSO.

Frontegg - Elegant user management, tailor-made for B2B SaaS