Keycloak can be brilliant. It can also make you swear at your keyboard.

Keycloak is one of the most powerful open-source identity and access management tools available today. It handles single sign-on (SSO), user federation, role-based access control, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect with remarkable depth. The architecture is flexible, the features are rich, and it integrates with complex systems. But usability remains its biggest pain point.

The Keycloak admin console is dense. Navigation requires precision. Common workflows—adding a realm, setting up identity providers, configuring client scopes—are often buried under layers of menus. The documentation is thorough in breadth but inconsistent in clarity, which makes the learning curve steep even for experienced engineers.

Realm and client configuration in Keycloak is powerful, but the UI flow can feel overloaded. Creating a new client involves multiple tabs with interdependent settings such as valid redirect URIs, web origins, and protocol mappers. A small mistake anywhere can break authentication flows, and debugging often requires digging through server logs and JSON configs.

User management provides strong capabilities for multi-tenant systems, but usability suffers from its split between the admin console and REST API. Tasks like bulk user imports or fine-grained role mappings usually need scripting around Keycloak’s REST endpoints, raising the barrier to entry for admins who expect these to be one-click operations.

Theme customization offers visual control for login pages, but requires editing FreeMarker templates and deploying custom themes to the server. There is no straightforward theme builder built into the UI, which means design changes often become dev-ops tasks instead of simple configuration steps.

At scale, Keycloak’s usability issues become magnified. Managing dozens of realms and hundreds of clients demands automation, yet the product’s automation story depends heavily on its APIs, not on the console. This pushes teams toward infrastructure-as-code solutions like Terraform providers for Keycloak, which improves maintainability but bypasses the default UI entirely.

Improving Keycloak usability is not just about polishing the interface—it’s about reducing friction in every common operation. Streamlined navigation, stronger bulk tools, more consistent documentation, and direct UI automation hooks would move Keycloak from powerful but challenging, to powerful and intuitive.

If you want to see how simplified identity management can feel—without losing Keycloak-level power—check out hoop.dev and see it live in minutes.