The scalable Keycloak alternative
Frontegg vs. Keycloak
Keycloak is free. And free can be really, really expensive.
Low code (not high maintenance)
Frontegg’s a low-code platform, which means that product managers, customer success managers, and infosec can directly manage the parts of CIAM that matter to them—without filing a Jira ticket. Instead of chasing engineers, non-developers can tweak login experiences, reset passwords, and fine-tune policies themselves. Keycloak? You’ll need a developer, a DevOps person, and probably a prayer.
Built for scale (not for stress)
Eventually, your product will mature and enterprise customers will come knocking (if they haven’t already!). Frontegg makes it easy to meet their expectations with out-of-the-box advanced features like SSO and SCIM, fine-grained authorization, and support for multiple applications. Keycloak is self-hosted, so your team owns deployment, upgrades, scaling and uptime — and extending it means writing and maintaining Java extensions. Unless you have a team dedicated solely to identity, that’s a heavy lift.
SLAs (not DIY support)
When you’re just getting started, it might seem fine to rely on community forums or GitHub when things go wrong. Upstream Keycloak is community-supported; a vendor SLA requires a separate commercial subscription. But as your user base grows and you start to onboard bigger customers, downtime and security misconfigurations become way more costly. Imagine having Keycloak when something breaks, and thousands or millions of users are depending on you. Congratulations. Your engineering team just turned into a help desk.
Self-sufficient customers (not dependent ones)
Frontegg comes with a self-service Admin Portal that plugs directly into your app and puts the power in your customers’ hands. No need to build another dashboard for something that’s not your core competency. Keycloak’s Admin Console is built for your own admins; recent versions let realm admins delegate per-organization admin rights there, but there’s no embeddable, in-app portal for your customers. Their admins either work inside Keycloak’s Admin Console or you build that experience into your product yourself.
Compare features
Compare features
Authentication
Both Frontegg and Keycloak offer authentication. Frontegg adds a no-code, fully hosted login box, while Keycloak login customization means building themes.
Standard login
No-code customization
Hosted IDP
M2M authentication
Entitlements
Frontegg offers entitlements for plans, trials and feature flags on top of fine-grained authorization (Enterprise). Keycloak’s Authorization Services cover policy-based access, but not plans, trials or flags.
RBAC
Subscription-based
Feature flags
Trial management
FGA
B2B capabilities
Keycloak added Organizations recently; Frontegg adds tenant-level roles and per-organization security policies (Enterprise).
Organization management
Hierarchies
Login per organization
User groups
Security
Frontegg offers comprehensive, flexible security features out of the box, including security dashboards and per-organization policies on Enterprise, which Keycloak doesn’t provide.
Risk and fraud engines
Security dashboards
Organizational level policies
Adaptive MFA
Step up
Logs streaming
Enterprise readiness
Both Frontegg and Keycloak provide SSO, SCIM and audit logs. Frontegg lets your customers configure SSO and SCIM themselves.
SSO
SCIM
Audit logs
Management & analytics
Both Frontegg and Keycloak offer user management, but only Frontegg offers a usage dashboard and analytics.
User management
Admin portal
Self-service
Frontegg’s admin portal allows full self-service. Keycloak has no in-app admin portal.
User login and signup
Profile management
User invitation
Organization management
Audit logs
SSO & SCIM configuration
Security configuration
Authentication
Both Frontegg and Keycloak offer authentication. Frontegg adds a no-code, fully hosted login box, while Keycloak login customization means building themes.
Entitlements
Frontegg offers entitlements for plans, trials and feature flags on top of fine-grained authorization (Enterprise). Keycloak’s Authorization Services cover policy-based access, but not plans, trials or flags.
B2B capabilities
Keycloak added Organizations recently; Frontegg adds tenant-level roles and per-organization security policies (Enterprise).
Security
Frontegg offers comprehensive, flexible security features out of the box, including security dashboards and per-organization policies on Enterprise, which Keycloak doesn’t provide.
Enterprise readiness
Both Frontegg and Keycloak provide SSO, SCIM and audit logs. Frontegg lets your customers configure SSO and SCIM themselves.
Management & analytics
Both Frontegg and Keycloak offer user management, but only Frontegg offers a usage dashboard and analytics.
Self-service
Frontegg’s admin portal allows full self-service. Keycloak has no in-app admin portal.
Leading the momentum on G2
4.8/5 | Based on 367 G2 Ratings 
