Head to head
Descope vs Keycloak
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
42/100Higher score | 38/100 | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #10 | #12 |
| Confidence | Medium confidence | Medium confidence |
| External Reputation | 77 | — |
| AI Authority | 6 | 32 |
| Web Authority | 16 | 27 |
| Expert Assessment | 69 | 64 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | $249/month (Pro, billed annually) · free tier: Free Forever at $0: 7,500 MAUs, 10 monthly active tenants, 3 SSO connections, 1 federated app (OIDC), 5 test users, 10,000 M2M exchanges, 2,000 MACs, 2,000 MATKs, all auth methods, RBAC, MFA, no watermark, community support, 99% SLA, 1-week audit retention | Not published · free tier: Entire community edition is free to download and self-host; no plan ladder, no per-user or per-MAU metering |
| Pricing model | Subscription with usage-based overages | Open source self-hosted (no licence fee); commercial support only via Red Hat subscription bundles |
| Best for | B2B SaaS teams that need to become enterprise-ready quickly with multi-tenancy, self-service SAML/OIDC SSO, SCIM and RBAC/FGA, plus startups on the Hello World program or small projects that fit inside the 7,500-MAU free tier and want passkeys by default. | Organisations with in-house platform/DevOps and Java/Kubernetes skills that want to run identity as infrastructure — especially high user volumes where per-MAU SaaS pricing dominates the budget, air-gapped or data-residency deployments, teams needing deep customisation, and existing Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Application Foundations or Red Hat SSO customers. |
| Avoid if | You need SCIM, fine-grained authorization, bot protection, HIPAA BAA, EU data residency or FedRAMP High on a small budget (all Growth-tier at $799/mo+), have many small tenants or many configured SSO connections, require month-to-month terms or self-hosted deployment, or need a deep independent review paper trail for procurement. | You have no dedicated ops capacity to absorb upgrade breakage, need a published self-serve price and formal SLA for vendor support, rely on non-technical administrators who need an intuitive console, need mature access certification and entitlement reviews in production today, or require a large verified public review corpus for procurement. |
| Markets | SMB, Startups, Mid-Market, Enterprise, B2B SaaS, B2C apps, Public sector | Enterprise, Mid-market, Public sector, Engineering-led SMB |
| Founded | 2022 | — |
| Headquarters | — | — |
A higher TOP SCORE means more of the evidence favours that platform on this methodology — it is not a recommendation, and it does not account for your specific requirements. Advertisers are never declared the winner of a comparison.