cidaas
Germany
EU
cidaas is a cloud identity and access management platform from Widas ID GmbH in Wimsheim, Germany. It belongs to the Widas Group, which has offered software made in Germany since 1997. cidaas...
European Alternatives to Keycloak
Curity
Sweden
EU
Self-Hostable
Curity is a Swedish identity software company founded in 2015 in Stockholm by specialists in OAuth, OpenID Connect and large-scale identity management. Its main product is the Curity Identity Server, an access...
Nevis
Switzerland
Self-Hostable
Nevis is an identity and access management platform from Nevis Security AG, headquartered in Zurich. The technology grew up inside the Swiss software company AdNovum and has been developed by an independent...
Univention Nubus
Germany
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable
Nubus is the open-source identity and access management solution of Univention GmbH in Bremen, Germany. Univention has built open-source software for identity management and application integration since 2002 and says its products...
ZITADEL
Switzerland
Open Source
Self-Hostable
Non-European Parent Company
ZITADEL is an identity platform for applications and developers. It was founded in 2019 in Switzerland, and its Swiss company CAOS AG has its office in St. Gallen. Today the company also...
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Submit SuggestionEuropean alternatives to Keycloak include ZITADEL (Switzerland), Univention Nubus (Germany), cidaas (Germany), Nevis (Switzerland) and Curity (Sweden). Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management server for single sign-on with OpenID Connect and SAML. Red Hat, which belongs to IBM, is its main maintainer, and the project has been in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as an incubating project since April 2023. It is free under the Apache 2.0 licence, so licence cost is rarely the reason to switch. All five options are on the category page for IAM and single sign-on.
Why teams move away from Keycloak
- Operating effort. Keycloak is a Java application on Quarkus. The team runs it with a database and, for high availability, a clustered cache, and carries out every upgrade itself.
- Support. The project offers community help. Commercial support comes through Red Hat's own build of Keycloak or through partners.
- Customisation. Login flows and integrations beyond the settings are built with themes and Java extensions, which needs Java knowledge.
- Provider choice. The Keycloak project offers no hosted service of its own. Organisations that want a European company as contract partner or a managed service have to look elsewhere.
How the European options compare
- ZITADEL: closest in spirit, open source under AGPL and available as cloud service or self-hosted. Younger and smaller than Keycloak, with a US parent company, as the listing notes.
- Univention Nubus: open source from Bremen, a user and device directory with single sign-on, strong where Active Directory is replaced. It runs on Kubernetes or as a virtual machine and is not built for millions of self-registering customers.
- cidaas: a commercial German cloud platform for customer and workforce identity with consent management. The vendor operates it, but the code is closed.
- Nevis: a Swiss commercial platform focused on banks and insurers for cloud or own-environment use.
- Curity: a Swedish identity server centred on OAuth and OpenID Connect for APIs, commercial and aimed at technical teams.
Before switching
List the realms, clients and identity providers in use, and check that the target supports the same protocols. Find out whether it can import password hashes; otherwise users must reset passwords. Run both systems side by side first. If the team can operate it, Keycloak remains a sound choice on a server in Europe. A move pays off when operating effort or missing support is the real problem.