Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups
Register | Login

Keycloak VS SuperTokens

Compare Keycloak VS SuperTokens and see what are their differences

Axcrypt
AxCrypt - Password Protect Files With Strong Encryption. AxCrypt is the leading open source file encryption software for Windows. featured
Contents:
  1. » Base Details
  2. » Videos
  3. » Reviews
  4. » Alternatives

Keycloak logo Keycloak

Open Source Identity and Access Management for modern Applications and Services.

SuperTokens logo SuperTokens

Open Source User Authentication - An Alternative to Auth0 / Firebase Auth / AWS Cognito
  • Keycloak Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-20
  • SuperTokens Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-26

SuperTokens is building open source authentication (as an alternative to Auth0, Firebase and AWS Cognito). Add secure, hassle free authentication to your app in 1 day. We enable startups to launch quicker and focus on their core product offering

  1. We're easier to implement as we take a modular approach - making it possible to pick only the features you need for your use case. This means you need not worry about complications associated with other features (eg: SSO and OAuth if you don’t need it) and this in turn makes it easier to implement and manage SuperTokens.
  2. Developer's can own and manage their user's data.
  3. SuperTokens can be run on your premise for free and also has a generous hosted tier for those who dont want to manage it themselves.

SuperTokens is being used by hundreds of developers across the globe.

Keycloak features and specs

  • Open-Source
    Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management solution, which means it is free to use and has a community-driven support system. This can lead to lower costs and more flexibility compared to proprietary solutions.
  • Feature-Rich
    Keycloak offers a comprehensive set of features including single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), user federation, identity brokering, and social login. This makes it suitable for a wide range of use cases.
  • Customizability
    With Keycloak, you can customize the authentication and authorization processes through its extensible architecture, allowing for the addition of custom features and integrations.
  • Integration Capability
    Keycloak supports integration with various protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML, making it versatile for integrating with different platforms and services.
  • Active Community
    Keycloak has an active and growing community of developers and users who contribute to its improvement and provide support, resources, and shared knowledge.

Possible disadvantages of Keycloak

  • Complexity
    Keycloak can be complex to set up and configure, especially for users who are not familiar with identity and access management concepts. This may require additional time and expertise.
  • Resource-Intensive
    Running Keycloak can be resource-intensive, requiring more CPU and memory compared to simpler authentication solutions. This may necessitate higher infrastructure costs.
  • Learning Curve
    The learning curve for Keycloak can be steep for new users due to its wide range of features and configuration options. Ample time might be required to fully understand and utilize its capabilities.
  • Documentation Quality
    While Keycloak has extensive documentation, some users find it to be insufficiently detailed or difficult to navigate, which can impede the setup and troubleshooting process.
  • Maintenance
    Operating a Keycloak instance involves ongoing maintenance tasks such as updates, security patches, and backups, which can be time-consuming and require dedicated resources.

SuperTokens features and specs

  • Ease of Integration
    SuperTokens is designed to be developer-friendly, providing easy-to-follow documentation and straightforward integration steps for adding authentication and authorization functionalities to applications.
  • Open Source
    Being open source, SuperTokens allows for transparency, peer reviews, and community-driven improvements, providing an advantage over proprietary solutions.
  • Feature-Rich
    It offers a wide range of features including session management, JWT support, email/password login, social login, and passwordless authentication, catering to various authentication needs.
  • Scalability
    SuperTokens is built to scale, making it suitable for both small applications and large-scale enterprises with significant user bases.
  • Security
    Emphasizes security best practices, providing robust mechanisms for session handling, token storage, and data encryption to ensure user information is safeguarded.

Possible disadvantages of SuperTokens

  • Complexity for Advanced Customization
    While it is easy to integrate, performing advanced customizations may require a deeper understanding of its internal workings, which can be time-consuming.
  • Dependency on Third-Party Infrastructure
    For some setups, SuperTokens may impose dependencies on third-party services or infrastructure, potentially leading to issues related to uptime, latency, and control.
  • Limited Community Support
    As a relatively newer player in the market, it might not have as extensive a community or ecosystem as some older, more established authentication solutions.
  • Data Privacy Concerns
    Although the solution emphasizes security, using any third-party service for authentication introduces some level of concern regarding data privacy, especially if sensitive user data is involved.
  • Initial Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of integration, there is still a learning curve associated with initially understanding how to best implement and use the various features offered by SuperTokens.

Analysis of Keycloak

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Keycloak is widely regarded as a good choice for organizations looking for a comprehensive and flexible identity management solution. It is especially praised in environments where open-source software is preferred or where customization and scalability are important.

Why this product is good

  • Keycloak is considered a robust open-source identity and access management solution that provides features like single sign-on (SSO), user federation, identity brokering, and social login. It is designed to secure applications and services with minimum effort and supports various standard protocols, such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML 2.0. It also offers a customizable interface and extensive integration capabilities, making it a versatile choice across different industries.

Recommended for

  • Organizations in need of a scalable identity and access management solution
  • Developers seeking an open-source, customizable platform
  • Businesses looking to implement SSO and secure applications quickly
  • Enterprises requiring integration with various identity providers and social media networks
  • Teams preferring a solution that supports industry-standard authentication protocols

Analysis of SuperTokens

Overall verdict

  • SuperTokens is a good choice for developers seeking a customizable and scalable authentication solution. Its open-source nature along with robust security features makes it appealing for projects of various sizes, particularly for those who prefer hands-on integration and configuration.

Why this product is good

  • SuperTokens is an open-source solution that offers simple and secure user authentication, providing features like single sign-on (SSO), session management, and social login. It stands out for its developer-friendly approach, scalable architecture, and open transparency into its codebase, which appeals to organizations that prioritize control and customization in their security stack.

Recommended for

  • Developers and businesses looking for a secure and scalable user authentication solution.
  • Organizations that prioritize customization and control over their security measures.
  • Projects that need to implement social logins or single sign-on capabilities efficiently.
  • Teams that value open-source solutions and community-driven development.

Keycloak videos

+ Add

What is Keycloak and what are the main features | DevNation Live

More videos:

  • Review - Keycloak Overview
  • Review - Easily Secure Your Front and Back End app with Keycloak

SuperTokens videos

+ Add

How SuperTokens detects Session Hijacking?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Keycloak and SuperTokens)

Keycloak

SuperTokens

Identity And Access Management
88 88%
Identity And Access Management
12% 12
Developer Tools
0 0%
Developer Tools
100% 100
Identity Provider
87 87%
Identity Provider
13% 13
SSO
100 100%
SSO
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Keycloak and SuperTokens. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Keycloak and SuperTokens

Keycloak Reviews

12 User Authentication Platforms [Auth0, Firebase Alternatives]
You can integrate Keycloak with your applications to have a single-sign-in and single-sign-out experience. Moreover, one can activate social logins without any modification in code. Additionally, it allows user authentication via existing OpenID Connect or SAML 2.0
Source: geekflare.com
10+ Open-source Single-Sign On (SSO) Solutions
Keycloak is a free, open-source identity and access management system with highly configurable Single-Sign-On (SSO) support.
Source: medevel.com
10 Best Auth0 Alternatives and Similar Platforms
Keycloak may be quite beneficial because it provides a built-in method for syncing with databases, such as LDAP or Active Directory, when your users already are registered on. If you use Social Login for social platforms such as Facebook, Keycloak might be a great tool for your organization.
Source: www.regendus.com
Top 5 Open Source Single Sign-On Software In the Year 2021
KeyCloak is another free software that is based on OpenID Connect, OAuth2.0, and SAML2.0. It provides SSO capabilities across web applications and web services. Above all, this open source software provides integrations with LDAP and Active Directory. There is a logical user interface where users can manage roles, permissions, and sessions. Moreover, this free solution...
Source: blog.containerize.com
IAM: A comparison of open-source tools
/ Digitalberry news / IAM: A comparison of open-source toolsIAM: A comparison of open-source toolsWhy use an Identity Provider (IdP)?Comparative study of Identity Providers (IdP)1. Our team’s first choice: Keycloak2. In second place of our comparative study: Gluu3. Special mention: FusionAuthDiscover our expertiseContact our experts
Source: www.digitalberry.fr

SuperTokens Reviews

  1. David Ruseel
    · Sr. Security Architect at Freelancer ·
    SuperTokens is reliable and safe

    The best part about this library is the level of security it provides with session management. Implementing the library was also easy through the document they provide and with the extensive support on discord channel. They also provided a lot of features compared to the previous library which I was using.

    🏁 Competitors: Auth0, Firebase, Amazon Cognito
    👍 Pros:    Jwt blacklisting|Rotating jwt signing key|Malware protection|Man in the middle attack protection
    👎 Cons:    Automatic email alerts for high resource usage
  2. Jacob Riley
    · Reverse Engineer, OSCP, OSCE at Freelancer ·
    SuperTokens! Best app for Session Security

    I used it with MongoDB and Nodejs. It was very robust and took care of all my security issues. It's super easy to implement like it took me somewhere around 2 to 3 days to implement also while installing it doesn't force or restrict you from doing something a certain way. The documentation provided by SuperTokens is phenomenal too.

    🏁 Competitors: ExpressJS
    👍 Pros:    Session security|Session management|Data protection and security|Simple pricing|Super simple|Easy to use|Information is easily accessible
    👎 Cons:    Not enough intergration yet
12 Best Open-source Database Backend Server and Google Firebase Alternatives
SuberTokens is a self-hosted open-source user authentication backend for startups and companies. It helps developer building a user-based workflow without the complication of complex authentication layer. SuberTokens offers user authentication, tokens management, session management, forget email workflow, email verification, social login support, and easy front-end...
Source: medevel.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, SuperTokens seems to be a lot more popular than Keycloak. While we know about 44 links to SuperTokens, we've tracked only 4 mentions of Keycloak. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Keycloak mentions (4)

  • Beyond the login page
    Most of the time nowadays, I prefer offloading this to an identity provider, using OpenID Connect or soon Federated Credential Management (FedCM), even if that means shipping an identity provider as part of the deliverables (I generally go with Keycloak, with keycloak-config-cli to provision its configuration). I'm obviously biased though as I work in IT services, developping software mainly for... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Okta Says Hackers Stole Data for All Customer Support Users
    Yet another breach of Okta... Why are companies not running something like keycloak [1] themselves? Are administrative/maintenance costs too high or is it plausible deniability? [1] https://keycloak.org. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • I built a ready-to-use auth server with TypeScript and Express.js
    I'd stick with a solution like https://keycloak.org in that instance. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Authelia is an open-source authentication/authorization server with 2FA/SSO
    A few more projects in this space: - Keycloak (you won't get fired for picking this)[0] - CloudFoundry's UAA[1] - Gluu [2] - Keratin [3] - OpenUnison [4] - Dex[5] - Netlify's GoTrue[6] All of these solutions are a bit different but here are some of the axes: - Whether or not they function as an OAuth provider - Whether they're centered around application-user-login (email + password) or application auth (OAuth) or... - Source: Hacker News / over 4 years ago

SuperTokens mentions (44)

  • Top 5 Open Source Identity and Access Management (IAM) providers 2025
    Home page | GitHub Repo | Documentation | Discord community. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Auth Pricing Wars: Cognito vs Auth0 vs Firebase vs Supabase
    For B2C, Supabase will get you most of the way for small to medium MAU applications. You might need additional services for analytics and monitoring. If you are building a boom-or-bust B2C company (ex. Social media platform, video game, media publication) you should consider using an open-source self-hosted solution like SuperTokens. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • OpenAUTH: Universal, standards-based auth provider
    How does this compare to supertokens https://supertokens.com/ that supports fastify express, hono, bun, koa, nuxt, react, vue, angular with email password + social login + OTP based login + single sign on all wrapped in a self hostable nice package? - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • The Joy of Astro
    My love for Astro and the web platform is well documented. I've contributed to the docs, I've built some integrations and themes. I recently rediscovered the joy of building with Astro when I made a demo integration with SuperTokens. The ultimate goal for it was to become a part of the create-supertokens-app CLI (published here). - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • How to use SuperTokens in a VueJS app with your own UI
    SuperTokens Core Service: This HTTP service talks to your database. It also contains the core logic for authentication. You can self-host with your database (with docker or without Docker or host it with a SuperTokens-managed service. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Keycloak and SuperTokens, you can also consider the following products

Auth0 - Auth0 is a program for people to get authentication and authorization services for their own business use.

Okta - Enterprise-grade identity management for all your apps, users & devices

Amazon Cognito - Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your web and mobile apps quickly and easily. It scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.

OneLogin - On-demand SSO, directory integration, user provisioning and more

Cotter - One-click phone number login and checkout

AuthAnvil - AuthAnvil software is an integrated identity and access management tool designed to help IT managers service their networks, infrastructure network, and ensure that devices are safe and secure at all times. Read more about AuthAnvil.

Loading...