# Keycloak vs Zitadel: 2026 Empirical Benchmark & Cost Shootout

> **Direct Answer (October 2026 Verdict)**: Keycloak wins for CNCF ecosystem dominance, banking-grade FAPI 2.0 compliance, and battle-tested multi-realm enterprise brokering across 37.5k+ GitHub stars (99.6), while Zitadel wins for lightweight 65MB Go binary footprint, native WebAuthn/Passkey UX, and turnkey multi-tenant B2B organizations across 15.4k+ GitHub stars (97.8).

- **Category**: CNCF Enterprise Java/Quarkus Federation vs Cloud-Native Lightweight Go Passkey IAM Shootout
- **Canonical URL**: https://exactbaseline.com/vs/keycloak-vs-zitadel
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## Keycloak Key Advantages
- 37,468+ GitHub stars under Apache-2.0 as the definitive enterprise open-source identity and federation standard
- Comprehensive support for OIDC, SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.1, Kerberos, and Financial-grade API (FAPI 2.0) security profiles
- Cuts commercial Okta and Auth0 Enterprise invoices by 96.3% ($120/mo self-hosted cluster vs $3,250/mo SaaS)

## Zitadel Key Advantages
- 15,380+ GitHub stars under AGPL-3.0 written in pure Go with an ultra-lean 65MB container memory footprint
- Built-in first-class multi-tenancy with isolated organization hierarchies, branding, and role-based permissions
- Native WebAuthn and Passkey passwordless authentication out of the box with event-sourced audit logs