Ory Keto VS Keycloak

Compare Ory Keto vs Keycloak and see what are their differences.

Ory Keto

Open Source (Go) implementation of "Zanzibar: Google's Consistent, Global Authorization System". Ships gRPC, REST APIs, newSQL, and an easy and granular permission language. Supports ACL, RBAC, and other access models. (by ory)

Keycloak

Open Source Identity and Access Management For Modern Applications and Services (by keycloak)
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Ory Keto Keycloak
35 229
4,610 19,857
2.0% 3.0%
8.5 10.0
2 days ago about 16 hours ago
Go Java
Apache License 2.0 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.

Ory Keto

Posts with mentions or reviews of Ory Keto. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-08.
  • Show HN: Blueprint for a distributed multi-region IAM with Go and CockroachDB
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Aug 2023
    One of Ory’s core competencies is permissions. We built the first Google Zanzibar implementation in the world and it’s part of Ory Network‘s global multi-region platform (https://github.com/ory/keto)

    A push model is also valid if you’re heavy on policies and can accept eventual consistency. We will investigate how to generally push things to the edge (like we did with Ory Edge Sessions) or to cryptographic verification wherever staleness is acceptable.

    By solving the primitives correctly in the beginning (with a multi region architecture) that job does become a lot easier, which is what we decided doing at Ory :)

  • Show HN: Open-source IAM Ory Kratos v1.0 with Passkeys, MFA and multi-region
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jul 2023
    slightly off-topic, but related to what ory is doing in general. How do you usually do authorization-aware search?

    Imagine, I have a bunch of Google docs and using https://github.com/ory/keto for authorization. I can quickly answer the question "does user X have access to document Y", but it is not easy to do "search all documents with word Hello in it, for which I have access" because access can be granted through nested groups (give read access to everyone in DepartmentA, and I am part of child department)

  • how to design database for Access Control Privileges ?
    1 project | /r/node | 11 Jul 2023
    if you want to integrate an existing framework see if https://github.com/ory/keto solves your problems, there are similiar frameworks that support ABAC
  • Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why Shines at Building Permissions
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jun 2023
    Shameless plug for Ory Keto, probably the best reference implementation IMO https://github.com/ory/keto
  • We built an open source authorization service based on Google Zanzibar
    7 projects | /r/golang | 3 Nov 2022
  • Open-source authorization service and policy engine based on Google Zanzibar
    2 projects | /r/programming | 28 Oct 2022
    Looks cool, wonder how it compares to Keto and Casbin.
    3 projects | /r/coolgithubprojects | 28 Aug 2022
  • Launch HN: Warrant (YC S21) – Authorization and access control as a service
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jul 2022
    How does Warrant compare to other Zanzibar based solutions like Ory Keto ?https://github.com/ory/keto
  • Show HN: Open-source authorization service based on Google-Zanzibar
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jul 2022
    Interesting to see another project open sourced around Google Zanzibar. On a timeline for context:

    - Ory came out first with Ory Keto ( https://github.com/ory/keto ) which is trying to be a close adaptation of the paper. Initially, many concepts were missing but they are making a lot of progress with the DSL and it interfaces with the rest of Ory (OAuth2, User Mangement)

    - Authzed came out as a SaaS only, open sorucing the code base later on at https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

    - Auth0 has been playing around with Zanzibar concepts in various forms and published a beta service at https://dashboard.fga.dev - apparently now also open source parts of it similar to what Authzed did: https://github.com/openfga

    - Permify - who on a side note spammed me quite a lot with outreach because I was active in these communities - joins as well https://github.com/Permify/permify

    It's exciting to see so much movement, yet also sad that so many companies are brewing their own beer instead of working collaborative on the more succesful projects. Feels like we'll just end up with one or two successful projects (looking at Ory / Auth0 here) with the rest perishing. I'm wondering if there truly is a business model for just this permission system as a saas service (looks like this is what everyone is going with). Here I'm giving Auth0 probably the biggest plus as they have an established identity service. Then again, Okta (parent of Auth0) and Auth0 themselves are not particularly known for good business practices that we usually expect from developer tooling.

    What's refreshing though with Permify is that they are trying a bit of a different approach to Zanzibar!

  • Zanzibar-like authorization framework written in Go
    3 projects | /r/golang | 13 Jul 2022
    Er, Ory Keto is written in Go.

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 Ory Keto and Keycloak you can also consider the following projects:

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

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

spicedb - Open Source, Google Zanzibar-inspired permissions database to enable fine-grained access control for customer applications

authentik - The authentication glue you need.

casbin - An authorization library that supports access control models like ACL, RBAC, ABAC in Golang: https://discord.gg/S5UjpzGZjN

Apache Shiro - Apache Shiro

cerbos - Cerbos is the open core, language-agnostic, scalable authorization solution that makes user permissions and authorization simple to implement and manage by writing context-aware access control policies for your application resources.

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!

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

oso - Oso is a batteries-included framework for building authorization in your application.

Spring Security - Spring Security