Keycloak vs Vault: What are the differences?

Keycloak and Vault are both powerful tools used for authentication and authorization in software applications. Let's explore the key differences between the two.

1. Security Focus: Keycloak, developed by Red Hat, primarily focuses on providing secure access to applications through single sign-on (SSO) and identity management. On the other hand, Vault, developed by HashiCorp, is primarily focused on providing secure storage and retrieval of sensitive data such as secrets, passwords, and encryption keys.

2. Token-based Authentication: Keycloak uses JSON Web Tokens (JWT) as its primary authentication mechanism. It allows applications to verify and validate the tokens to grant access to protected resources. In contrast, Vault supports various authentication methods like token-based, username/password, and LDAP among others, making it more flexible for different authentication scenarios.

3. Secrets Management: One of the key features of Vault is its ability to manage secrets securely. It provides a centralized system for storing and accessing secrets, with support for automatic generation and revocation of secrets. While Keycloak does have some support for storing and managing client secrets, it is not as feature-rich or specialized in secrets management as Vault.

4. High Availability and Scalability: Keycloak supports clustering and can be set up in a highly available and scalable manner. It uses a distributed cache to improve performance and allow horizontal scaling. Vault also supports high availability and scalability but requires extra configuration and setup for clustering. It uses storage backends like Consul or integrated storage to enable clustering.

5. Ease of Use and Integration: Keycloak provides a user-friendly administration console and various integration options with popular identity providers like LDAP, Active Directory, and SAML. It also has built-in support for social login using providers like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Vault, on the other hand, has a more command-line driven interface and may require some learning curve to get started. Integration with external systems may require additional plugins or custom development.

6. Extensibility and Customization: Keycloak offers a wide range of customization options, allowing developers to tailor the authentication and authorization processes to their specific needs. It supports custom user federation, role-based access control, and custom authentication flows. Vault, on the other hand, is more focused on providing a secure and reliable secret management solution and does not offer as many extensibility options as Keycloak.

In summary, Keycloak is primarily focused on authentication, single sign-on, and identity management with a strong emphasis on user-friendly features and wide integration options. Vault, on the other hand, is primarily focused on secure storage and management of secrets and has more advanced capabilities in that area.