2 posts tagged with "saml"

Migrating from Okta to Keycloak is not a user migration. The users are the easy part: Okta's Users API hands you profiles and group membership, and Keycloak's partial-import endpoint takes them. Two other things decide how long this takes. Okta will not give you password hashes — they are an import-only field, so every user either resets a password or authenticates through Okta one last time while you drain. And every SAML and OIDC application has to be re-pointed by hand, one at a time, because the assertion consumer URL, the entity ID and the signing certificate all change when the identity provider does.

So the schedule is set by the app inventory, not by the user count. A thousand users is one afternoon. Forty SAML apps is a quarter. Everything below was run against Keycloak 26.8.1 in start-dev, and the Okta side is from Okta's published API specification, read on 2026-10-19.

SAML has a bit of a reputation. For many developers, it lives in that shadowy corner of the B2B internet where XML still rules and stack traces seem to go on forever. If you've ever had the misfortune of debugging a malformed <Assertion>, you know the pain. But here's the thing: it doesn't have to be a nightmare.

At Phase Two, we provide managed hosting and enterprise support for Keycloak, a leading open-source Identity and Access Management platform. And while OIDC has become the default for most modern applications, SAML is still alive and well—especially in enterprise environments.

This post is a gentle (and opinionated) introduction to what SAML is, how it works, and why it still matters particularly if you're implementing SAML SSO in Keycloak.