authentik VS Keycloak

Compare authentik vs Keycloak and see what are their differences.

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authentik Keycloak
165 229
6,685 19,762
12.2% 3.0%
10.0 10.0
5 days ago 6 days ago
Go Java
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

authentik

Posts with mentions or reviews of authentik. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-14.
  • Show HN: Stack, the open-source Clerk/Firebase Auth alternative
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2024
    If you're looking for a system that has more features, is user friendly, a nice admin ui and easy deployments compared to Keycloak. Please give https://goauthentik.io/ a shot. Not affiliated in any way, just a very happy user.

    It has

    -an admin UI

    - Supports (LDAP, SAML, OAUTH, social logins)

    - MFA, Passkeys

    - Application access based on user groups etc

  • immich SSO with Authentik
    3 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2024
  • Show HN: Auth0 OSS alternative Ory Kratos now with passwordless and SMS support
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2024
    Hey, for authentik this is actually something we're actively working on: https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/pull/8330, and this will be included in our next feature release in April!

    (Disclaimer, I am founder and CTO of authentik)

  • Keycloak SSO with Docker Compose and Nginx
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2024
    See here for the fix, which both implements the workaround suggested in the issue and also a much more standard-compliant method: https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/pull/8471
  • Has anyone had any success setting Authentik up behind Caddy for a reverse proxy?
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 8 Dec 2023
    Ask in the correct places for support: https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/discussions and https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues
  • Authentik setup via Portainer?
    1 project | /r/synology | 7 Dec 2023
    I've been searching around for a while now, and struggling with getting Authentik setup on my NAS. I'd like to deploy via Portainer, but getting lost in the documentation just to deploy.
  • Show HN: Obligator – An OpenID Connect server for self-hosters
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Oct 2023
    Personally I went with Keycloak, because it's fairly well documented and also has Docker images available: https://www.keycloak.org/getting-started/getting-started-doc... although the fact that they want you to create an "optimized" image yourself and have a long build/setup process on startup instead is slightly annoying: https://www.keycloak.org/server/containers

    Regardless, with something like mod_auth_openidc or another Relying Party implementation, all of the sudden authn/authz becomes easier to manage (you can literally get user information including roles in headers that are passed from your gateway/relying party to apps behind the reverse proxy), regardless of what you have actually running in your APIs: https://github.com/OpenIDC/mod_auth_openidc (there are other options, of course, but I went with that because I already use mod_md).

    It's actually cool that there are plentiful options in the space, since OIDC is pretty complex in of itself and attempts at creating something pleasant to actually use are always welcome, I've also heard good things about Authentik: https://goauthentik.io/

  • Issues with authentik
    1 project | /r/NixOS | 7 Jul 2023
    Hello ! I am hosting a server under NixOS with multiple services, and to simply the identity management, I use authentik (https://goauthentik.io/) which can be compared to keycloak. Everything works fine until I try to enable mastodon to host an instance : authentik returns an error 400 and nothing changes this but disabling mastodon. Does anyone have an idea of what could be the cause of this ?
  • HAProxy with Forward Auth to Authentik
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 7 Jul 2023
    For Authentik, it looks like they are not interested to write how to configure HAProxy with it https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/issues/5768
  • Authentik reverse proxy vs swag
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 7 Jul 2023

Keycloak

Posts with mentions or reviews of Keycloak. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-03.
  • Securing Vue Apps with Keycloak
    3 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2024
    In this article we'll be using Keycloak to secure a Vue.js Web application. We're going to leverage oidc-client-ts to integrate OIDC authentication with the Vue app. The oidc-client-ts package is a well-maintained and used library. It provides a lot of utilities for building out a fully production app.
  • User Management and Identity Brokering for On-Prem Apps with Keycloak
    1 project | dev.to | 3 Apr 2024
    Keycloak has been a leader in the Identity and Access Management world since its launch almost 8 years ago. It is an open-source offering under the stewardship of Red Hat
  • Navigating Identity Authentication: From LDAP to Modern Protocols
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 Mar 2024
  • Ask HN: No-code, simple-setup user management
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
    It sounds like what you're looking for is an identity provider.

    A popular open source option is https://www.keycloak.org/

    This application can manage your users, then you can use standards like OpenID or SAML to plug it into your application, of which there are usually many plugins to accomplish this depending on your tech stack.

  • Top 6 Open Source Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solutions For Enterprises
    3 projects | dev.to | 21 Feb 2024
    KeyCloak is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that offers enterprise IAM solutions. Keycloak emphasizes proficient enterprise authorization solutions by providing:
  • Outline: Self hostable, realtime, Markdown compatible knowledge base
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2024
    Outline only uses SSO for authentication. The solution when self hosting is use a private keycloak server [1]. This allows you to do email based auth.

    [1] https://www.keycloak.org/

  • Keycloak open redirect: wildcard redirect URIs can be exploited to steal tokens
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jan 2024
    > Keycloak was good but has too much legacy for 10+ years.

    I got curious, actually seems to check out and explains why it's so well documented (but also complex and oftentimes confusing):

    > The first production release of Keycloak was in September 2014, with development having started about a year earlier.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keycloak

    https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/releases/tag/1.0.0.Fina...

  • What Is OIDC?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Dec 2023
    > Don't outsource either your authentication or authorization. Run it in-house.

    This is hard to do, though. I hope people here will drop a lot of combinations that work for them!

    Personally, for a small/medium scale project, I went with:

    Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/

    It supports various backing RDBMSes (like PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL and others), allows both users that you persist in your own DB, as well as various external sources, like social login across various platforms, is an absolute pain to configure and sometimes acts in stupid ways behind a reverse proxy, but has most of the features that you might ever want, which sadly comes coupled with some complexity and an enterprise feeling.

    I quite like that it offers the login/registration views that you need with redirects, as well as user management, storing roles/permissions and other custom attributes. It's on par with what you'd expect and should serve you nicely.

    mod_auth_openidc: https://github.com/OpenIDC/mod_auth_openidc

    This one's a certified OpenID Connect Relying Party implementation for... Apache2/httpd.

    Some might worry about the performance and there are other options out there (like a module for OpenResty, which is built on top of Nginx), but when coupled with mod_md Apache makes for a great reverse proxy/ingress for my personal needs.

    The benefit here is that I don't need 10 different implementations for each service/back end language that's used, I can outsource the heavy lifting to mod_auth_openidc (protected paths, needed roles/permissions, redirect URLs, token renewal and other things) and just read a few trusted headers behind the reverse proxy if further checks are needed, which is easy in all technologies.

    That said, the configuration there is also hard and annoying to do, as is working with OpenID Connect in general, even though you can kind of understand why that complexity is inherent. Here's a link with some certified implementations, by the way: https://openid.net/developers/certified-openid-connect-imple...

  • Auth0 increases price by 300%
    7 projects | /r/webdev | 7 Dec 2023
    You couldn't pay me to use their bullshit...if you need an identity server/provider go with Keycloak. Open source, free, and standards based, works better and scales better too.
  • Hasura and Keycloak integration with NestJS server
    5 projects | dev.to | 7 Dec 2023
    #docker-compose.yml version: '3' volumes: postgres_data: driver: local services: postgres: container_name: postgres image: postgres:15-alpine restart: unless-stopped volumes: - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data - ./init/db:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ command: postgres -c wal_level=logical ports: - '5433:5432' environment: POSTGRES_DB: ${POSTGRES_DB} POSTGRES_USER: ${POSTGRES_USER} POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD} hasura: container_name: hasura image: hasura/graphql-engine:v2.29.0 restart: unless-stopped depends_on: - postgres # - keycloak ports: - '6080:8080' volumes: - ./hasura/metadata:/hasura-metadata environment: ## postgres database to store Hasura metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_METADATA_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/hasura_metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB} HASURA_GRAPHQL_LOG_LEVEL: warn ## enable the console served by server HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE: 'true' # set to "false" to disable console ## enable debugging mode. It is recommended to disable this in production HASURA_GRAPHQL_DEV_MODE: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLED_LOG_TYPES: startup, http-log, webhook-log, websocket-log, query-log ## enable jwt secret when keycloak realm is ready # HASURA_GRAPHQL_JWT_SECRET: '{ "type": "RS256", "jwk_url": "http://keycloak:8080/realms/development/protocol/openid-connect/certs" }' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET: ${HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET} HASURA_GRAPHQL_UNAUTHORIZED_ROLE: anonymous HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_REMOTE_SCHEMA_PERMISSIONS: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_MIGRATIONS_SERVER_TIMEOUT: 30 # To view tables in Postgres # pgweb: # container_name: pgweb # image: sosedoff/pgweb:latest # restart: unless-stopped # ports: # - '8081:8081' # environment: # - DATABASE_URL=postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}?sslmode=disable # depends_on: # - postgres keycloak: container_name: keycloak image: quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:22.0.5 command: ['start-dev'] # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # command: ['start-dev', '--import-realm'] environment: ## https://www.keycloak.org/server/all-config KEYCLOAK_ADMIN: admin KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD: password123 KC_DB: postgres KC_DB_PASSWORD: postgres_pass KC_DB_USERNAME: postgres KC_DB_SCHEMA: public KC_DB_URL: jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/keycloak_db KC_HOSTNAME: localhost ports: - 8090:8080 depends_on: - postgres # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # volumes: # - ./realm-export.json:/opt/keycloak/data/import/realm.json:ro

What are some alternatives?

When comparing authentik and Keycloak you can also consider the following projects:

authelia - The Single Sign-On Multi-Factor portal for web apps

zitadel - ZITADEL - The best of Auth0 and Keycloak combined. Built for the serverless era.

Apache Shiro - Apache Shiro

keycloak-operator - ARCHIVED Kubernetes Operator for the no longer supported WildFly distribution of Keycloak

OPA (Open Policy Agent) - Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open source, general-purpose policy engine.

jellyfin-plugin-ldapauth - LDAP Authentication for Jellyfin

IdentityServer - The most flexible and standards-compliant OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.x framework for ASP.NET Core

docker-swag - Nginx webserver and reverse proxy with php support and a built-in Certbot (Let's Encrypt) client. It also contains fail2ban for intrusion prevention.

Spring Security - Spring Security

vouch-proxy - an SSO and OAuth / OIDC login solution for Nginx using the auth_request module

Ory Kratos - Next-gen identity server replacing your Auth0, Okta, Firebase with hardened security and PassKeys, SMS, OIDC, Social Sign In, MFA, FIDO, TOTP and OTP, WebAuthn, passwordless and much more. Golang, headless, API-first. Available as a worry-free SaaS with the fairest pricing on the market!