The scalable Keycloak alternative
Keycloak is free. And free can be really, really expensive.
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.
“Overall it’s a pain and I’d far rather offload it to an external auth service at this point.”
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. With Keycloak, scaling often means cobbling together plugins, managing your own uptime, and hoping your dev team won’t quit. Unless you have a team dedicated solely to identity, Keycloak’s extensibility is dangerously limited.
“Not worth the hassle.”
When you’re just getting started, it might seem fine to rely on community forums or GitHub when things go wrong. 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.
“It's just death by a thousand needles with some feature not working, or being changed or that you need to engineer a solution for on your own.”
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 offers an admin console for developers and IT staff — but your end customers are at your mercy to manage their users, configure SSO, or invite team members. Unless you want to build that UI yourself, they’ll be running to you for everything.
“We maintained Keycloak for some time and it simply wasn’t worth it.”
Both Frontegg and Auth0 offer authentication. But Frontegg offers a full self-service login box, while Keycloak requires more dev work.
Standard login
No-code customization
API customization
Hosted IDP
M2M authentication
Frontegg offers fine-grained authorization -- called Entitlements. Keycloak offers RBAC and that’s it.
RBAC
ABAC
Subscription-based
Feature flags
Trial management
FGA
Frontegg is purpose-built for B2B use cases: Manage organizational hierarchies, use role-level organization, and much more. Keycloak’s B2B capabilities rely on custom code.
Organization management
Hierarchies
Role level organization
Login per organization
User groups
Frontegg offers comprehensive, flexible security features out of the box. Keycloak doesn’t offer any of it except logs streaming, which requires external tooling.
Risk and fraud engines
Security dashboards
Organizational level policies
Adaptive MFA
Step up
Logs streaming
Both Frontegg and Keycloak provide SSO and audit logs, but only Frontegg offers SCIM natively.
SSO
SCIM
Audit logs
Both Frontegg and Keycloak offer user management, but only Frontegg offers a usage dashboard and analytics.
User management
Usage dashboard
Organizational signals
Admin portal
Frontegg’s admin portal allows full self-service. Keycloak has no in-app admin portal.
User login and signup
Profile management
User invitation
SSO & SCIM configuration
Security configuration
