Do coding agents recommend Keycloak?
Keycloak was chosen in 3% of 520 judged authentication sessions, ranking sixth. Measured with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code.
Keycloak was chosen in 3% of 520 judged authentication sessions, ranking sixth. It was also raised as a candidate in 156 further sessions without being chosen.
This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code had to solve a problem in authentication inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Keycloak. What an agent actually installed.
The numbers
| Category | Authentication |
| Sessions in the category | 520 |
| Sessions where Keycloak was chosen | 13 |
| Install share | 3% |
| Rank in category | 6 of 26 |
| Codebases it won in | 4 |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 156 |
| Chosen when considered | 8% |
| Site | keycloak.org |
By agent
With 13 wins spread across 5 agents, the rates below are small numbers and a difference between them is not yet a finding. They are here because the direction is worth knowing, not because the gap is established.
| Agent | Sessions | Chose Keycloak | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 133 | 4 | 3% |
| Codex | 136 | 7 | 5% |
| Cursor | 133 | 1 | 1% |
| Grok Build CLI | 50 | 0 | 0% |
| Muse Code | 68 | 1 | 1% |
By who was asking
Keycloak performs similarly across the four kinds of buyer, from 0% to 7%. That is unusual: the category leader changed with the persona in 23 of the 29 categories we measured.
| Who is asking | Sessions | Chose Keycloak | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe coder | 71 | 0 | 0% |
| Junior developer | 160 | 1 | 1% |
| Senior engineer | 174 | 12 | 7% |
| Enterprise team | 115 | 0 | 0% |
What Keycloak was up against
The full ranking in authentication, from the same sessions:
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Auth0 | 117 | 23% |
| 2 | WorkOS AuthKit | 117 | 23% |
| 3 | Clerk | 61 | 12% |
| 4 | Microsoft Entra ID | 55 | 11% |
| 5 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 48 | 9% |
| 6 | Better Auth | 21 | 4% |
| 7 | Keycloak (this page) | 13 | 3% |
| 8 | Arctic | 9 | 2% |
What this means
This is an integration problem, not a presence problem. Agents raised Keycloak in 156 sessions and chose it in 13, so it reaches the shortlist and then loses. Something at the last step is costing the session, and in our data that is usually a quickstart that does not run when pasted, documentation describing an interface that changed, or a package name that does not match the product name.
That is the cheaper of the two problems to have. The reason is written down in each losing transcript.
Where these numbers come from
The 520 sessions in authentication are part of a published set of 11,878, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.
Every authentication run can be replayed on the board.
If you work on Keycloak: the judge recorded a reason for every session where it was raised and passed over. Those reasons are in the transcripts.
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Common questions
Do coding agents recommend Keycloak?
Yes. Keycloak was chosen in 13 of the 520 judged sessions in authentication, a 3% install share, ranking sixth in its category.
Does Claude Code recommend Keycloak?
In 4 of the 133 sessions in authentication run with Claude Code, which is 3%.
Do different coding agents treat Keycloak differently?
Not much. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code chose it at similar rates, between 0% and 5% of their runs.
How was this measured?
Real coding agents at pinned versions were run in sandboxes inside 91 realistic codebases and asked to solve real tasks. A simulated project owner approved or questioned each recommendation before any code was written, and a judge from a model family that builds none of the agents read every session blind.
How often is Keycloak considered but not chosen?
It was raised as a candidate in 156 sessions without being chosen, and chosen in 13. That is a 8% conversion from considered to chosen.
Where this comes from
Armature ran 11,878 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code inside 91 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.