What makes Zitadel the best Keycloak alternative

1. What is Keycloak and Zitadel
   1. Keycloak
   2. Zitadel
2. Main Differences
   1. Source Code
   2. Operating Model
   3. Pricing
   4. Project Structure
   5. Self-service
   6. Data Residency
   7. Location Of Incorporation
   8. Extensibility
3. What’s Next for Zitadel: Development Priorities for 2025
4. Decision Framework: Selecting Zitadel for your Identity Needs
5. Let’s Make Your Identity Management Easier!

When choosing the right authentication provider for your application it can be hard to narrow down one that works not just for your organization internally but also for your customer and partners. Recognizing the diverse needs of a modern identity management system that is both flexible and secure can become an overwhelming task, especially in a market that offers a plethora of alternatives. That’s why it is important to understand the value proposition of the vendor offerings and evaluate how they fit your organizational requirements.

In this article, we will compare and contrast two open source alternatives - Keycloak and Zitadel.

What is Keycloak and Zitadel

Keycloak

Keycloak is an Open Source Identity and Access Management platform built for the foundational commercial solution “Red Hat Single Sign-On” that serves both the Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) markets. Keycloak was initially developed by WildFly, a division of Red Hat and was adopted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) on April 10, 2023 as an incubation project. Keycloak has been maintained by the CNCF community ever since. It brings functions like identity-brokering, multi-factor / passwordless authentication, access management, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0, and to some degree, multi-tenancy.

Zitadel

Zitadel is an API-first identity platform that is built for developers. It offers easier integration into your tech stack to support the authentication, authorization, and self-service needs. Extended as an open source and a commercial solution, it also provides a long-term audit trail out-of-the-box to ensure the security and compliance posture for your organization. Zitadel provides free and cloud subscription tiers, along with a self-hosted version for organizations that require complete data ownership. Zitadel’s comprehensive identity platform supports business-to-business (B2B) use cases including multi-tenancy, identity brokering, multi-factor or passwordless authentication, delegated access management, and in-context audit trail. Zitadel supports the standard integration protocols such as OpenID Connect, SAML 2.0, and OAuth 2.0.

Main Differences

Source Code

Keycloak leverages the open source friendly Apache 2.0 license on their platform repository. This license is catered towards community support and common across the open source landscape. Up to version 2, Zitadel leveraged the Apache 2.0 license but will transition to the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0) with the upcoming version 3. The AGPL license ensures that any modifications to Zitadel need to be made available to the community. This creates a more reciprocal relationship between Zitadel and organizations that leverage and build upon our platform. It protects the open nature of our project while encouraging contributions back to the community.

For most of Zitadel’s community, this change will have minimal impact:

• For end-users: If you are only using Zitadel as an identity platform, the license change doesn't affect you.
• For contributors: Your future contributions will be licensed under AGPL-3.0 and we will introduce a contributor license agreement (CLA).
• For service providers: If you modify Zitadel and provide it as a service to others, you'll need to make your modifications available under the AGPL-3.0 license.
• For developers: If you are using our Examples, Libraries, SDKs, APIs, do not worry we will keep those under their existing license.

Our commercial licensing options remain available for organizations that require different terms. Please reach out to us if you have any questions about licensing, we have compiled a detailed blog post and an FAQ for you.

Operating Model

Self-hosting is easy with either Keycloak and Zitadel. While choosing a platform is important, both solutions have the ability to use custom-built operators for Kubernetes to install and operate the Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution.

In addition, Zitadel offers the ability to run your instance in the cloud, managed by Zitadel directly. There is a wide range of managed service providers for Keycloak from managed instances to extensions.

If you are evaluating between cloud or self-hosting options, we recently wrote a blog post laying out the pros and cons of the self-hosting and cloud approaches.

Pricing

With open source as a driving force for Keycloak and Zitadel, the code is freely available on GitHub. However in the case of Keycloak, the community is the only contributor to their product ecosystem. Red Hat does offer a paid service “Red Hat Single Sign-On” leveraging Keycloak.

Zitadel’s pricing model is tailored to your organization’s needs, focusing on three core elements: Support Level Agreements (SLA), Daily Active Users (DAUs), and Technical Account Management (TAM). We include essential features such as multifactor authentication and passkeys at no additional cost, and we don’t charge based on the total number of users stored in your system.

Project Structure

Zitadel has a unique way to group clients that belong to the same security context into what we call “Project”. Projects help users bundle together clients, for example a web-application and a mobile-application, that share the same authorization mechanics. This ensures developers see consistent results across all clients without needing to manually configure audience scopes. The project allows you to delegate the access control and permission management to a third party. More details on how our “project grants” work are here.

Keycloak historically has used a tenancy model that was constructed around the idea of realms as means of separation of concern for close to all resources, including users, clients, roles, policies and so on. In the summer of 2024, Keycloak announced a change in their project structure with the addition of Organizations. This enables support for multi-tenancy through the Organization management model and its inherent members.

Self-service

Keycloak and Zitadel both offer extensive self-service capabilities including user profile management, access control delegation, and the ability for business customers to configure their own identity providers.

Data Residency

Both Zitadel and Keycloak empower organizations with data residency through their self hosted solutions. With Zitadel, enterprise customers choose self-hosted deployments to maintain maximum control over their infrastructure and data governance.

For strict data residency requirements, Zitadel supports regional cloud hosting and self-hosted deployments, giving organizations complete control over their data location and security protocols. Zitadel offers flexible data residency options with hosting regions in the United States, Europe, Switzerland, or Australia. Keycloak also has unaffiliated third parties that offer cloud hosting for prospective customers.

Location Of Incorporation

Keycloak is a CNCF steered project which is not incorporated per se. They rely on their distributed developer community to maintain and drive their open source project forward. With headquarters in the United States and a principal office in Switzerland, Zitadel provides flexible contracting options through its dual-entity structure. Organizations serving European Union customers can contract through Zitadel's Swiss entity, leveraging Switzerland's data protection adequacy status granted by the European Commission. This simplifies EU data transfer compliance compared to the more complex requirements for US-based providers.

Extensibility

Keycloak’s extensibility relies on Service Provider Interfaces (SPI) to fill customers' technical needs; otherwise custom code becomes a necessity. This creates the risk of maintaining and upgrading Keycloak's environment.

Zitadel’s event-driven architecture enables organizations to customize workflows by responding to any authentication or audit event. The Zitadel platform’s Session API and Login Experience features offer extensive customization options for both functionality and branding to align with your organization’s requirements. As a fast-growing open-source company, Zitadel rapidly incorporates customer feedback through strategic partnerships and contributions on GitHub.

What’s Next for Zitadel: Development Priorities for 2025

Zitadel maintains a public product roadmap and operates with full transparency as an open-source platform. It includes significant feature releases planned for platform development and performance optimization in 2025.

• Performance Optimization: Comprehensive platform-wide performance enhancements that focus on core authentication service response times, API endpoint optimization across new and existing services, enhanced resource management efficiency, and improved system scalability.
• TypeScript Login with OIDC: A new, highly customizable login interface for our customers, built in with TypeScript and OpenID Connect support. Self-hosting customers will soon be able to use the hosted login option with OIDC.
• User Schema Management: This feature offers advanced user profile customization enabling granular control over field management permissions between users and administrators.
• Configurable Caching System: Beta release of flexible caching infrastructure supporting Redis integration for improved object lookup performance.
• SCIM Interoperability: This is the implementation of System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol for automated user provisioning, synchronization, and lifecycle management across external systems.
• Actions Framework v2: This feature offers enhanced extensibility framework supporting custom triggers and executions through API endpoints for advanced workflow customization.
• User Group Authorization: The implementation of user group management capabilities enable efficient authorization management at scale, expanding beyond individual user permissions.

Decision Framework: Selecting Zitadel for your Identity Needs

Zitadel is particularly suitable for organizations that prioritize these capabilities:

Security and Control: Your organization requires complete control over infrastructure through self-hosting options, and you need robust data protection measures. Zitadel’s staff publish and fix security issues across the Zitadel ecosystem. Unlike Keycloak which is reliant on the good will of the community members. This presents the opportunity to feel confident in Zitadel's comprehensive audit trails that provide detailed long-term tracking of all authentication and authorization activities.

Business Architecture: Zitadel excels in multi-tenant environments, making it ideal for organizations managing multiple client organizations or separate business units. Zitadel’s B2B-focused approach is designed to handle complex organizational relationships and hierarchies.

Technology Philosophy: If your organization values open-source solutions, Zitadel offers full transparency and the ability to customize the platform to your needs. It is built on cloud-native and serverless principles, making it a natural fit for modern, scalable architectures.

Community Engagement: As an open-source platform, Zitadel welcomes direct contributions from its user community. This means you can actively participate in improving the platform and adapting it to meet emerging needs in identity management.

Let’s Make Your Identity Management Easier!

Transform your organization’s authentication and access control with Zitadel. Connect with our team to:

• Assess your current identity infrastructure needs
• Design a tailored implementation strategy
• Learn how to scale seamlessly as your organization grows

Book a consultation today to start your journey towards simplified, secure identity management.

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