Ipsilon vs Keycloak

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted identity & sso options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
FeatureIpsilonKeycloak
CategoryIdentity & SSOIdentity & SSO
LicenseGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguagePythonJava
Setup difficultyHardHard
Min. RAM512 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentbare-metal, sourcedocker, kubernetes, bare-metal
GitHub stars★ 80★ 36,058
First released20142014
ReplacesOkta, PingFederateOkta, Auth0, Microsoft Entra ID

Why pick each one

Choose Ipsilon if…

  • Good FreeIPA companion
  • Federation focused
Ipsilon details

Choose Keycloak if…

  • Mature and battle-tested
  • Strong enterprise feature set
Keycloak details

Frequently asked questions

Is Ipsilon or Keycloak better?

Neither is universally better. Keycloak has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Ipsilon and Keycloak free and open-source?

Yes. Ipsilon is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Keycloak under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Ipsilon and Keycloak with Docker?

Ipsilon: check the project docs for container support. Keycloak: yes.

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