StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Operating Systems
  5. CentOS vs FreeIPA

CentOS vs FreeIPA

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CentOS
CentOS
Stacks13.8K
Followers9.0K
Votes53
FreeIPA
FreeIPA
Stacks41
Followers100
Votes3
GitHub Stars1.1K
Forks359

CentOS vs FreeIPA: What are the differences?

CentOS: The Community ENTerprise Operating System. The CentOS Project is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem. For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon, along with extensive resources to build, test, release, and maintain their code; FreeIPA: Manage Linux users and client hosts in your realm from one central location with CLI, Web UI or RPC access. FreeIPA is an integrated Identity and Authentication solution for Linux/UNIX networked environments. A FreeIPA server provides centralized authentication, authorization and account information by storing data about user, groups, hosts and other objects necessary to manage the security aspects of a network of computers.

CentOS and FreeIPA can be primarily classified as "Operating Systems" tools.

FreeIPA is an open source tool with 317 GitHub stars and 186 GitHub forks. Here's a link to FreeIPA's open source repository on GitHub.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on CentOS, FreeIPA

Jerome/Zen
Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Decided

Global familiarity, free, widely used, and as a debian distro feels more comfortable when rapidly switching between local macOS and remote command lines.

CentOS does boast quite a few security/stability improvements, however as a RHEL-based distro, differs quite significantly in the command line and suffers from slightly less frequent package updates. (Could be a good or bad thing depending on your use-case and if it is public facing)

271k views271k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

CentOS
CentOS
FreeIPA
FreeIPA

The CentOS Project is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem. For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon, along with extensive resources to build, test, release, and maintain their code.

FreeIPA is an integrated Identity and Authentication solution for Linux/UNIX networked environments. A FreeIPA server provides centralized authentication, authorization and account information by storing data about user, groups, hosts and other objects necessary to manage the security aspects of a network of computers.

-
Built on top of well known Open Source components and standard protocols; Strong focus on ease of management and automation of installation and configuration tasks; Full multi master replication for higher redundancy and scalability; Extensible management interfaces (CLI, Web UI, XMLRPC and JSONRPC API) and Python SDK;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
1.1K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
359
Stacks
13.8K
Stacks
41
Followers
9.0K
Followers
100
Votes
53
Votes
3
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 16
    Stable
  • 9
    Reliable
  • 9
    Free to use
  • 6
    Good support
  • 6
    Has epel packages
Cons
  • 1
    Yum is a horrible package manager
Pros
  • 2
    Manages sudo command groups and sudo commands
  • 1
    Manages host and host groups
Integrations
No integrations available
Python
Python
Linux
Linux
JSON
JSON

What are some alternatives to CentOS, FreeIPA?

Ubuntu

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.

Auth0

Auth0

A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enables Single Sign On and user management to all your applications.

Debian

Debian

Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software.

Stormpath

Stormpath

Stormpath is an authentication and user management service that helps development teams quickly and securely build web and mobile applications and services.

Arch Linux

Arch Linux

A lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

Keycloak

Keycloak

It is an Open Source Identity and Access Management For Modern Applications and Services. It adds authentication to applications and secure services with minimum fuss. No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users. It's all available out of the box.

Fedora

Fedora

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system.

Linux Mint

Linux Mint

The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

Devise

Devise

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden

Firebase Authentication

Firebase Authentication

It provides backend services, easy-to-use SDKs, and ready-made UI libraries to authenticate users to your app. It supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Google,

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase