Acronis vs Keycloak

Acronis is a Swiss-headquartered cyber protection company founded in 2003, known for its True Image disk imaging software and, today, mainly for a multitenant platform that managed service providers use to back up, secure and manage their clients' systems. EQT agreed in 2024 to take a majority stake, and Acronis says more than 20,000 service providers and 750,000 businesses use its platform.

The business offering, marketed as the Acronis Cyber Platform and sold to service providers as Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, combines backup of servers, PCs, VMs and Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with disaster recovery, EDR and MDR, email security, data loss prevention, patching, RMM and PSA-style billing and service desk tools. MSPs pay per workload for actual usage; IT departments buy one to three year terms. The consumer line, Acronis True Image, is sold per year: Essentials for local backup and cloning, Advanced with cloud storage and anti-malware, and Premium with 1 TB or more of cloud storage.

Acronis fits MSPs that want one console for backup, security and RMM, and home or small-office users who need full-disk images and cloning. Backblaze is simpler and cheaper for plain cloud backup, Afi.ai focuses on SaaS backup for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and Veeam is the usual choice for large virtualized data centers.

Buying tip: True Image prices rise with each extra computer and terabyte, so a 3 or 5 computer pack is better value for households. MSPs should check which security modules they already license elsewhere.

Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management server, originally created by Red Hat and now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project under the Apache 2.0 license. It provides single sign-on for web and mobile applications and APIs using the standard OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0 protocols, and it runs on your own infrastructure.

Its feature set matches commercial identity products: user federation with LDAP and Active Directory, identity brokering with social logins and external identity providers, multi-factor authentication with OTP and WebAuthn, password policies, fine-grained authorization services, realms for multi-tenancy, an admin console and a self-service account console. Login pages and emails can be themed, and extensions are written in Java through service provider interfaces. The software is free; Red Hat sells a supported distribution, the Red Hat build of Keycloak, for organizations that need commercial support.

Keycloak fits enterprises, public institutions and B2B software vendors that need to keep identity data under their own control, for example for data residency or regulatory reasons. The trade-off is operational: running it in high availability, tuning databases and caches, upgrading between major versions and customizing themes require expertise. Startups that want hosted authentication with polished UI components usually choose Auth0, Clerk or WorkOS, while Authentik and Zitadel are newer open-source alternatives with lighter operations.