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Guardian vs Keycloak: What are the differences?
Developers describe Guardian as "Remove the OAuth dance with one request". Avoid dealing with OAuth logic in your code, and spend more time creating your product. Guardian reduces the OAuth footprint in your code to a single request. Built with modularity in mind, Guardian leverages plugins to handle OAuth flows, should you encounter a flow that Guardian doesn't handle, create a small flow plugin to do so and carry on. Guardian comes with 5 pre-made plugins that cover 99% of OAuth services. 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.
Guardian and Keycloak belong to "User Management and Authentication" category of the tech stack.
Guardian is an open source tool with 628 GitHub stars and 42 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Guardian'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 Guardian
Pros of Keycloak
- It's a open source solution33
- Supports multiple identity provider24
- OpenID and SAML support17
- Easy customisation12
- JSON web token10
- Maintained by devs at Redhat6
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Cons of Guardian
Cons of Keycloak
- Okta7
- Poor client side documentation6
- Lack of Code examples for client side5
