Grafana vs Keycloak
The ultimate side-by-side head-to-head analysis for 2026.
Short answer
- Price: not directly comparable — Grafana is free tier available, Keycloak is free.
- How to start: Grafana is free tier available, Keycloak is free.
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. We do not publish a quality score, because we do not have one we can stand behind. They cannot tell you which tool fits your workflow — the sections below are there for that. How we score tools.
Grafana
Keycloak
Category
Developer Tools
Developer Tools
Base Price
Free tier
Free
Public API
Yes
Yes
Mobile app
Yes
No
Open source / self-hostable
Yes
Yes
SSO (SAML)
Yes
Yes
Choose Grafana if:
Any team that needs to see what its systems are doing, from one server to a large fleet.
Choose Keycloak if:
Organisations that need enterprise identity without a per-user bill.
Grafana: pros & cons
- Connects to dozens of data sources out of the box
- Open source and self-hostable
- Alerting built into the same tool as the dashboards
- Dashboard design takes real effort to get right
- Cloud pricing scales with data volume
- Configuration sprawl on large teams
Keycloak: pros & cons
- Full identity server at no licence cost
- Standards support including SAML and OIDC
- Complete control over user data
- Operating it is a real responsibility
- Administration console is dense
- Upgrades need care
Our verdict on Grafana
The default choice for dashboards, and rightly so. Budget time for building the dashboards, not just installing it.
Our verdict on Keycloak
The serious open-source answer to Auth0. Budget for the operations, because the licence saving is not free.