Head to head
Keycloak vs Clerk
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
38/100 | 53/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #12 | #3 |
| Confidence | Medium confidence | Medium confidence |
| External Reputation | — | 70 |
| AI Authority | 32 | 63 |
| Web Authority | 27 | 14 |
| Expert Assessment | 64 | 52 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | Not published · free tier: Entire community edition is free to download and self-host; no plan ladder, no per-user or per-MAU metering | From $25/mo (Pro) — vendor-domain explainer, not verified on the billing page · free tier: Free "Hobby" plan covering 50,000 monthly retained users; all features free in development mode |
| Pricing model | Open source self-hosted (no licence fee); commercial support only via Red Hat subscription bundles | Subscription (metered on monthly retained users) |
| Best for | 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. | React/Next.js product teams shipping B2B SaaS or paid B2C below roughly 50k retained users, who value time-to-launch over auth-layer control, have engineers able to work around component styling limits, and whose incident tolerance can absorb slow vendor support. |
| Avoid if | 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. | You run a non-JavaScript stack, need deep domain-specific authorization, operate a free/ad-supported or high-churn consumer app at scale, need Clerk to be your billing system today, or carry hard support SLAs and regulated uptime obligations. |
| Markets | Enterprise, Mid-market, Public sector, Engineering-led SMB | SMB, Mid-Market, B2B SaaS, Startups |
| Founded | — | — |
| 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.