3 posts tagged with "workos"

A few quarters ago you got handed a single-line ask: "we need enterprise SSO and directory sync by the end of the quarter." Maybe the deal was a Fortune-500 logo. Maybe it was a Series B requirement. Either way you found WorkOS, wired in their SDK in a long weekend, shipped the deal, and got the high five.

Then the renewal came in. The seat-based pricing, that sounded harmless when you had two customers using SSO, looks different when you have forty. Suddenly there's a line item on a board slide that scales linearly with your enterprise revenue — a parasite that eats into the very margin that the enterprise tier was supposed to fund. The CFO walks over and asks you to "fix it."

Here is the awkward truth nobody tells the engineer-on-the-spot: the WorkOS feature set has had a fully open-source equivalent for years. Keycloak handles SSO. Phase Two's organizations extension handles multi-tenant orgs. The identity provider wizard handles the same admin-portal flow your customers see in WorkOS today. The catch is that nobody wanted to spend the runway to migrate.

We've now built the tool that turns that "we'll deal with it later" debt into an afternoon of work. Why? Because WorkOS customers are starting to wake up to Keycloak, and they're coming to us in droves.

Exploring Keycloak as an Alternative to WorkOS for Authentication Solutions

Keycloak and WorkOS are both identity and access management (IAM) solutions that offer various features for authentication, authorization, and user management. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two platforms that make them unique and suitable for different use cases. Keycloak is an open source platform under active development for over 8 years and known for its scalability and customization options. WorkOS is a closed-source platform that can quickly integrate SSO to an application. In this blog post, we'll explore the key differences between Keycloak and WorkOS, focusing on factors such as cost of ownership, scalability, deployments, and maintenance.

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.