Keycloak vs Okta Workforce Identity

Keycloak is the leading open-source alternative to Okta, providing SSO, MFA, and identity brokering with zero licensing costs. The trade-off is clear: Keycloak gives you complete control, customization, and data sovereignty, but demands significant engineering investment to deploy, operate, and maintain. Okta removes that operational burden with a managed cloud platform and the broadest integration ecosystem, but at a substantial per-user cost.

Choose Keycloak if you have the engineering talent to operate identity infrastructure and want to eliminate licensing costs while gaining full customization and data sovereignty. Choose Okta if you need a managed identity platform that provides the broadest integration network, enterprise support, and governance features without the operational burden of self-hosted infrastructure.

Okta Workforce Identity starts at SSO from $2/user/month; Adaptive MFA from $6/user/month (per-user tiers (billed annually)). Keycloak starts at Free (open source) / Red Hat Build of Keycloak via subscription (open source + enterprise subscription). As always, the sticker price only tells part of the story. Factor in add-ons, implementation costs, and what's actually included at each tier.

It depends on how deeply Keycloak is embedded in your stack. Most teams run both in parallel for a few weeks before cutting over. Check whether Okta Workforce Identity supports importing your existing configs or policies. That's usually the biggest time sink.