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4.  Authelia vs Keycloak 

# Authelia vs Keycloak

Side-by-side comparison of identity tools. Sponsored placement is disclosed where applicable.

Last updated today

Quick answer

## Authelia vs Keycloak: which should you choose?

Short answer

Authelia vs Keycloak have overlapping use cases in identity and access management. The right pick depends on your company size, deployment model, integrations, and pricing tolerance — compare those attributes side-by-side below.

Best for

Authelia: Self-hosters, homelabs and small platform teams that want free SSO and 2FA in front of web apps behind an existing reverse proxy. · Keycloak: Organizations that require a fully open source, self-hosted IAM platform with enterprise-grade features and no licensing cost. Strong fit for large enterprises with technical resources to operate it, government agencies with data sovereignty requirements, and universities or research institutions managing complex identity federation.

When to choose

Pick the option whose company-size fit, deployment model, and integrations most closely match your stack.

When not to choose

Skip a head-to-head if you haven't shortlisted a category yet — start with the IAM Stack Finder instead.

Related tools & categories

[Authelia](/directory/authelia)[Keycloak](/directory/keycloak)[IAM Stack Finder](/stack-finder)[Buyer resources](/resources)

Attribute

[Authelia](/directory/authelia)[](https://www.authelia.com/)

[Keycloak](/directory/keycloak)[](https://www.keycloak.org)

Best for

Self-hosters, homelabs and small platform teams that want free SSO and 2FA in front of web apps behind an existing reverse proxy. 

Organizations that require a fully open source, self-hosted IAM platform with enterprise-grade features and no licensing cost. Strong fit for large enterprises with technical resources to operate it, government agencies with data sovereignty requirements, and universities or research institutions managing complex identity federation. 

Short description

Apache-2.0 open-source authentication and authorization server that adds SSO, two-factor and passkey login and access-control rules in front of applications via reverse proxies, and acts as an OpenID Connect 1.0 provider. 

Keycloak is the most widely deployed open source IAM platform, providing enterprise-grade SSO, MFA, SAML, OIDC, LDAP, and Kerberos support in a self-hosted, Apache 2.0 licensed package maintained by Red Hat. 

Company size

startup, smb 

Mid-market, Enterprise, Government / Education 

Deployment

self\_hosted 

Self-hosted 

Source

open source 

Open source (Apache 2.0) 

Pricing model

free 

Free (open source); Red Hat SSO commercial support available separately 

Integrations

Traefik, NGINX, Caddy, HAProxy, Envoy, SWAG, NGINX Proxy Manager, Skipper 

Active Directory, LDAP, Google, GitHub, Facebook, Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy 

Categories

SSO, MFA / Passwordless, Customer Identity / CIAM, Developer Authentication 

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