Okta vs Keycloak

Where Keycloak wins

The meter disappears, and so does the minimum

Okta Workforce Identity bills per user per month with a $1,500 annual contract minimum on every tier, which is the detail small teams find out late. At the Starter list price of $6, that minimum is only filled at about 21 users, so a 10-person company pays an effective $12.50 per user per month and cannot buy at list price at all. Keycloak has no seat count, no monthly active user figure and no contract. For a few hundred employees that is a five-figure annual line item that stops existing, and for a ten-person team it removes a floor that was never sized for you.

Nobody decides who gets SSO based on cost

The quieter benefit is behavioural. When identity is metered, adding contractors, seasonal staff or a service desk account is a budget conversation, and the workaround is usually a shared login outside SSO. With no meter, every human and every application goes behind single sign-on because there is no reason not to. That is a security improvement that a feature comparison does not show.

Standards, not a catalogue

Keycloak does OIDC and SAML 2.0 properly, brokers external identity providers, federates LDAP and Active Directory, and exposes everything through a documented admin API. Anything that speaks the protocols works, which in practice covers modern SaaS and everything you wrote yourself. There is no per-application integration tier and no waiting for a vendor to add a connector.

Your data stays where you put it

Directory, sessions, audit log and MFA enrolments live in your database in your region. If data residency, an air-gapped environment or a regulator's question about processors is part of the requirement, self-hosting answers it structurally instead of contractually. It also shrinks the failure domain: a compromise at a shared vendor support system is not a path into your tenant, because there is no shared vendor support system.

The project is not a hobby

Keycloak is Apache-2.0 with roughly 36,000 GitHub stars and commits landing daily as of August 2026, is a CNCF project, and Red Hat ships a supported build of the same codebase. If self-hosting later turns out to be more than you want to carry, buying support is a purchase order rather than a migration.

Where Okta still wins

You are not comparing a licence to a licence, you are comparing a licence to a rota. Keycloak needs two or more nodes, a highly available database you back up and restore-test, TLS and certificate rotation, minor upgrades several times a year, and someone reachable when it breaks. When an identity provider is down, nobody logs into anything: not email, not the ticket system you would use to report it. Okta's price includes that being someone else's night. Price a self-host at the cost of the on-call rota, not the cost of two virtual machines, or the comparison is not honest.

Okta Workflows has no equivalent here, and lifecycle is where the real work lives. Provisioning on hire, de-provisioning on termination, group membership driven by HR data: on Okta that is a visual builder, and on Keycloak it is scripts against the admin API that you write, test and own. There is no import path from Workflows to anything on this list. If your joiner and leaver process is currently automated in Okta, budget that rebuild as its own project and do not discover it during the cutover.

The application catalogue is a genuine time saver. Okta ships thousands of pre-built integrations with the quirks of each vendor's SAML implementation already handled. Keycloak configures the same applications by protocol, which is fine when the other side is standards-compliant and tedious when it is not. Expect to spend real time on the two or three legacy applications that are creative about SAML.

And compliance sometimes wants a supplier, not a server. Auditors ask for SOC 2 reports, an accountable processor and a support contract with response times. A self-hosted identity provider makes you the accountable party for all of it. That is often acceptable and occasionally not, and it is a cheaper question to ask before the migration than during it.

Migrating Okta to Keycloak

The path most teams take:

1. Inventory by protocol, not by name. List every application on Okta and mark each as OIDC, SAML or neither. The "neither" pile, meaning agents, desktop SSO and anything Okta-specific, is your actual project scope. Everything else is a configuration swap.
2. Stand Keycloak up next to Okta and federate. Point Keycloak at the same LDAP or Active Directory, or broker Okta itself as an identity provider so the two coexist. Nothing is cut over yet and rollback costs nothing.
3. Move one low-risk application, then one noisy one. An internal tool first to validate claims, groups and roles. Then something with real users, because the mappings that break are always the custom ones.
4. Plan the MFA re-enrolment, do not discover it. Authenticator enrolments stay with Okta. Users register a new factor on first login, so pick a window, tell people what to expect and keep a documented path for the person who loses access on day one.
5. Rebuild lifecycle automation before you cancel. Whatever Okta Workflows does today needs an equivalent against the Keycloak admin API, and de-provisioning is the half that matters for security. Keep both providers live for one full joiner and leaver cycle.
6. What does not move. Audit history, Workflows definitions and Okta-specific policy logic stay behind and disappear when the tenant closes. Export the log retention that compliance may ask for before the final day.