Auth0 Essentials → Keycloak, self-hosted
Stay. At $50 an hour, Keycloak costs you $3,365 more over 3 years.
This one only pays off if your hour is worth less than
$6.86/hrThat is below the minimum wage almost anywhere this software is run. In practice it means stay on Auth0 Essentials: the subscription is cheaper than the hours Keycloak would take, and it is not close.
Running it yourself is not worth your hours — but paying PikaPods $6.50 a month to run it is. The arithmetic below is for doing it yourself.
Auth0 Essentials is billed flat rather than per seat, so team size does not change this comparison.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Auth0 Essentials $35.00/month, flat, billed monthly | $35.00 |
| Every month | $35.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 20 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.14 |
| Your time 1.5 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $75.00 |
| Every month | $95.14 |
| Migration, once 24 hours of your time, our estimate | $1,200.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | −$60.14 |
| After one year | −$1,922 |
| After 3 years | −$3,365 |
Or don't run it yourself
This is the case the arithmetic above misses. Running Keycloak yourself is not worth your hours — but paying PikaPods to run it is.
PikaPods runs Keycloak from $6.50/month. Runs the same open-source software, applies updates, and takes daily encrypted backups to storage you own. The maintenance hours drop to zero, because not spending them is the entire product.
| PikaPods Keycloak their published minimum for this app | $6.50 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $6.50 |
| Migration, once 12 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $600.00 |
| After 3 years, against Auth0 Essentials | $426 |
At $50 an hour that saves $426 over 3 years, against a $3,365 loss for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for Keycloak and rises with the CPU, memory and storage you give it — it is not the same allocation as the Vultr box priced above, and a busy install will cost more. Verified 19 Oct 2026 from their catalogue.
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Auth0's uptime record, on the one service where downtime locks every user out of everything
- Anomaly detection, breached-password checks and bot protection out of the box
- Rules, Actions and the extension marketplace
You gain
- MAU-independent pricing — the reason anyone considers this at 10,000+ users
- Full OIDC and SAML with no feature gating behind an enterprise tier
- Apache-2.0 licensing and a CNCF-adjacent governance model
Read this before you decide
- This is the one on this site we are most cautious about. Identity is the worst thing to run badly: a botched Keycloak upgrade locks every user out of every application at once.
- The 24-hour migration estimate is realistic only if you already understand OIDC. Double it if you do not.
- Auth0 Essentials at $35/month is priced for up to 500 monthly active users. Below that ceiling Auth0 is very hard to beat, and this page will usually tell you to stay.
- Budget for a staging Keycloak as well. The arithmetic here assumes one box; a serious deployment wants two.
Is the project alive?
keycloak/keycloak has 37,431 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (26.8.1) 6 days ago. Licence: Apache-2.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Auth0 figure is the site's own wording: “Essentials $ 35 / month ... Up to 500 monthly active users”.
| Auth0 pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| keycloak/keycloak activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 25 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.