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FreeIPA vs Keycloak: What are the differences?
Developers describe FreeIPA as "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. On the other hand, Keycloak is detailed as "An open source identity and access management solution". 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.
FreeIPA belongs to "Operating Systems" category of the tech stack, while Keycloak can be primarily classified under "User Management and Authentication".
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.
I am working on building a platform in my company that will provide a single sign on to all of the internal products to the customer. To do that we need to build an Authorisation server to comply with the OIDC protocol. Earlier we had built the Auth server using the Spring Security OAuth project but since in Spring Security 5.x it is no longer supported we are planning to get over with it as well. Below are the 2 options that I was considering to replace the Spring Auth Server. 1. Keycloak 2. Okta 3. Auth0 Please advise which one to use.
It isn't clear if beside the AuthZ requirement you had others, but given the scenario you described my suggestion would for you to go with Keycloak. First of all because you have already an onpremise IdP and with Keycloak you could maintain that setup (if privacy is a concern). Another important point is configuration and customization: I would assume with Spring OAuth you might have had some custom logic around authentication, this can be easily reconfigured in Keycloak by leveraging SPI (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_development/index.html#_auth_spi). Finally AuthZ as a functionality is well developed, based on standard protocols and extensible on Keycloak (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/authorization_services/)
We have good experience using Keycloak for SSO with OIDC with our Spring Boot based applications. It's free, easy to install and configure, extensible - so I recommend it.
You can also use Keycloak as an Identity Broker, which enables you to handle authentication on many different identity providers of your customers. With this setup, you are able to perform authorization tasks centralized.
Pros of FreeIPA
- Manages sudo command groups and sudo commands1
- Manages host and host groups1
Pros of Keycloak
- It's a open source solution32
- Supports multiple identity provider23
- OpenID and SAML support15
- Easy customisation10
- JSON web token9
- Maintained by devs at Redhat5
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Cons of FreeIPA
Cons of Keycloak
- Okta7
- Poor client side documentation6
- Lack of Code examples for client side5
