2 posts tagged with "auth0"

Exploring Keycloak as an Alternative to Auth0 for Authentication Solutions​

When it comes to implementing authentication and authorization in web applications, Auth0 and Keycloak are two prominent solutions that offer robust security features. While Auth0 is a popular choice for many developers due to its comprehensive, cloud-based platform, Keycloak presents a compelling alternative, especially in terms of cost and flexibility. This blog post will delve into how Keycloak stacks up against Auth0, focusing on cost of ownership, maintenance, and functionality.

Cost of Ownership​

There are many factors to think about with a total cost-of-ownership. We've written extensively about choosing an Open-Source IAM over a managed service.

Auth0: Auth0 operates on a subscription model, which can be quite enticing for startups or small projects with minimal authentication needs. It offers a free tier limited by the number of authentications per month, active users, MFA setups, and more. As needs quickly increase for a business to setup a modest number of IDP connections, include minimal additional "users" (which could be people or devices), extract logs, customize deployments, and more, those bills can quickly spiral into $100K+. For SMB's to Enterprise, dedicating that amount of resources to your Auth solution can be untenable.

Keycloak: Keycloak, on the other hand, is an open-source solution developed by Red Hat. It is free to use, regardless of the number of users or the scale of the project. This makes Keycloak particularly attractive for businesses looking to cut costs or those who prefer not to be tied to vendor-specific pricing structures. The primary cost associated with Keycloak comes from the need to self-host and manage the software, which includes server costs and potential overhead for setup and maintenance. This can mean the ongoing cost is fixed since its not driven by features or users.

Winner

Keycloak

Leveraging Phase Two's managed hosting provides a more capable free tier to test out and integrate Authorization and Authentication into an application(s). When that application's needs grow, Keycloak quickly becomes a far more cost-effective choice.

Maintenance​

Auth0: One of the main advantages of Auth0 is that being a managed service, it requires minimal maintenance from the user's side. The Auth0 team handles updates, security patches, and infrastructure, ensuring that the system is kept up-to-date.

Keycloak: Conversely, Keycloak requires more attention since it's self-hosted. Organizations must allocate resources for installing, configuring, and updating the software, as well as managing the underlying infrastructure. This can be a drawback for teams without the necessary technical expertise or resources. However, it also offers greater control over the deployment and security standards, which can be a significant advantage for certain regulatory environments.

Winner

Auth0.

As a fully managed service, Auth0 abstracts away this work.

Functionality and Flexibility​

Auth0: Auth0 offers a wide range of authentication features out-of-the-box, including social logins, enterprise federation, database connections, and more. It supports a variety of standards like OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and SAML, making it highly versatile for modern web applications. The platform also provides robust analytics and real-time monitoring tools that can be crucial for understanding user behavior and mitigating potential security threats.

Keycloak: Keycloak matches Auth0 in terms of functionality, supporting similar authentication protocols and user federation. It also offers customizable user interfaces for login, registration, and account management, which can be tailored to match the specific needs of a business. Being open-source, Keycloak allows developers to modify the codebase and integrate with other systems more freely than Auth0, offering a higher degree of customization at the cost of additional developer effort.

Winner

Keycloak

Auth0 and Keycloak offer much of the same functionality for Authenication and Authorization, however Keycloak is extremely flexible to extend and configure. It's a system that can adjust and grow with an application.

Integrating Keycloak with External Systems like Auth0​

For organizations looking to transition from Auth0 to Keycloak or integrate Keycloak with systems that are already using Auth0, Keycloak's flexibility offers significant advantages. Keycloak can be configured to act as a broker that sits between Auth0 and your applications. This setup allows organizations to leverage the strengths of both platforms. For example, an organization can use Auth0 for external user management due to its robust third-party integrations while using Keycloak to handle more sensitive internal authentication needs.

The identity brokering capability of Keycloak enables it to delegate authentication to external Identity Providers (IdPs), such as Auth0. This means that Keycloak can manage internal permissions and roles, provide additional security checks, and maintain a user-friendly, consistent login experience across different systems. The ability to integrate seamlessly with services like Auth0 simplifies the migration process for companies transitioning from one authentication system to another and provides a layer of flexibility for new authentication strategies without disrupting user access or security.

Which One Is Best for Me?​

Choosing between Auth0 and Keycloak largely depends on your organization’s specific needs and capabilities. Auth0 is an excellent choice for those who need a fully managed solution with costs linked to user numbers and features. However, for organizations that prioritize cost savings and predictability, have the capability to manage their infrastructure, or require extensive customization, Keycloak emerges as a powerful, budget-friendly alternative.

Both platforms offer extensive documentation and community support, which can help mitigate some of the challenges associated with implementation and maintenance.

Ultimately, we at Phase Two believe marrying the two together is the strongest match. We offer robust hosting options that fit well for multiple business sizes. Coupling the capabilities of Keycloak and the advantages of a managed service translates directly to implementation and cost control. Leveraging Keycloak means that ongoing costs are relatively fixed, since concerns about user growth or feature needs don't have to factor into every decision.

In today's digital landscape, managing user identities and securing access to applications and services is paramount for businesses of all sizes. As the demand for robust identity and access management (IAM) solutions grows, so does the market, with various commercial options vying for attention. When we first started using Keycloak over 7 years ago, we were surprised that there was a relatively unknown, but completely open-source alternative to commercial offerings in the Identity and Access Management market.

Commercial offerings​

Companies such as Auth0, Okta, Microsoft (through AzureAD) had created cloud authentication services, and helped bring standardization to the market through implementation of standards, such as OIDC, SAML, SCIM, LDAP, etc. However, there was little differentiation among them, and despite their pricing models, were essentially commodities that were the same.

Amazon released AWS Cognito, which did price it as a commodity, but failed so miserably in UI and developer ergonomics, that it failed to reach a dominant market position despite its de minimis cost.

More recently, nascent companies such as WorkOS and Frontegg, while casting themselves as CIAM and “SSO made easy” to enterprise SaaS customers, are really just repackaging the same IAM features and protocol implementations that have been available in Keycloak for years. Furthermore, the pricing models have tilted back towards predatory on your company’s business model.

Open source alternatives​

Amidst this landscape, open-source alternatives like Keycloak are emerging as powerful contenders, offering unique advantages over their commercial counterparts. Because the market has settled on standard protocols, it opened the door for superior open-source implementations to emerge with feature parity and standards compliance. Keycloak stands out as an alternative to commercial IAM solutions, enabling your business to unlock both flexibility and control.

1. Open Source Foundation: At the heart of Keycloak lies its open-source nature. Developed by Red Hat, Keycloak provides a fully-fledged IAM solution that is freely available for anyone to use, modify, and extend according to their requirements. This open ethos empowers organizations with unparalleled flexibility and control over their identity infrastructure, without being tied to proprietary vendors or licensing agreements. Furthermore, given the core security requirements of the protocol implementations, developing in the open gives customers the reassurance that the code has been audited by others, unlike closed source, buggy, commercial implementations that come with zero transparency or guarantees.
2. Cost-Effectiveness: One of the most significant advantages of Keycloak is its cost-effectiveness. Unlike commercial IAM solutions that operate on subscription-based pricing models, Keycloak eliminates licensing fees, enabling organizations to allocate resources more efficiently. With Keycloak, businesses can scale their identity infrastructure without worrying about escalating costs, making it an attractive option for startups, small businesses, and enterprises alike.
3. Customization and Extensibility: Keycloak stands out for its robust customization and extensibility capabilities. From authentication flows and user federation to role-based access control (RBAC) and fine-grained permissions, Keycloak provides a plethora of features that can be tailored to suit specific use cases and compliance requirements. Moreover, its modular architecture and comprehensive API support facilitate seamless integration with existing systems and third-party services, empowering developers to build bespoke identity solutions with ease.
4. On-Premise and Cloud Deployment: Whether organizations prefer on-premise deployment for enhanced security and compliance or cloud-based solutions for scalability and convenience, Keycloak offers the flexibility to meet diverse deployment needs. With support for Docker, Kubernetes, and other containerization technologies, Keycloak simplifies deployment across various environments, ensuring seamless integration into existing infrastructure and workflows.
5. Active Community and Support: Backed by a vibrant community of developers and contributors, Keycloak benefits from ongoing enhancements, bug fixes, and feature additions. This active ecosystem fosters innovation and collaboration, with users sharing best practices, troubleshooting tips, and extensions through forums, mailing lists, and code repositories. Additionally, organizations seeking professional support and services can leverage expertise of a growing ecosystem of companies providing support, ensuring reliable deployment and ongoing maintenance of their Keycloak instances.

Barriers​

So, given Keycloak's inherent advantages, while solving all of the same problems, why has it failed to receive broad market adoption? Looking back, and polling our customer base, it seems that Keycloak has suffered from a couple of barriers:

1. Awareness: Other than a couple of markets (e.g. Germany) Keycloak is still relatively unknown. Because it’s not a commercial entity, there isn’t a content marketing engine that focuses on discovery for common use cases.
2. Onboarding: Documentation for getting successful for common use cases is fragmented and often hard to find. When solving a new problem, examples are a great way to get a developer “hooked”, but these are largely missing from official Keycloak documentation.
3. Community: Because the core Keycloak developers have largely been working for one customer (RedHat) and not the community at large, developers who are exploring Keycloak for the first time can find it hard to know where to ask question. While the Discourse, GitHub, Slack and mailing lists are a good direction, there’s not a definitive way to get support.
4. UI: The Keycloak Admin UI, while complete, is intimidating to new users. Unlike the commercial alternatives, that have invested resources in building and measuring customer success into their UIs, while Keycloak’s attitude has been "RTFM". Furthermore, the user facing UIs of Keycloak are notoriously “rough edged”, commercial alternatives are beautiful, modern, and capable of easy customization and branding.

Obviously, we think that the barriers are something that can be solved, and Phase Two has been working hard in its open source extensions and cloud offerings to overcome these barriers. We've already made great strides, and believe that we're at the point where customers can realize the above advantages, while compromising relatively little -- All while achieving tremendous cost savings.

Migrating from your current identity provider​

Already using one of the commercial systems? Keycloak is a complete, robust and mature identity solution that can replace your identity provider and user management systems today. It has complete parity with all of the major features of commercial IAM systems, and because of reliance on standards, migration is easier than you think. By migrating to Keycloak, you gain full control over your authentication and authorization processes, enabling seamless integration, customization, and scalability tailored to your organization's unique needs. 

Phase two has implemented user migration support in the product for all tiers. This is meant to ease your transition from your existing user management system so that migration can occur incrementally with a complete fallback plan. For Premium and Enterprise subscribers, we include migration support. Contact sales to get started with your migration.

Conclusion​

In a landscape dominated by commercial IAM solutions, Keycloak shines as a compelling alternative that combines the power of open source with enterprise-grade features and flexibility. With its cost-effectiveness, customization capabilities, deployment flexibility, and active community support, Keycloak empowers organizations to take control of their identity infrastructure, unlock new possibilities, and adapt to evolving security and compliance requirements. Whether you're a startup looking to bootstrap your identity management or an enterprise seeking to streamline operations, Keycloak offers a compelling solution that puts you in the driver's seat of your IAM journey.