Adoption & Ecosystem
Who uses it
There is no CNCF case study or vendor-neutral adopter survey for ZITADEL, because it is not a CNCF-hosted project. The citable adopters are the organizations that self-reported in the repository's ADOPTERS.md. Treat this as self-declared rather than independently verified.
| Organisation | Use case | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Rawkode Academy | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
| XPeditionist | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
| devOS: Sanity Edition | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
| CNAP.tech | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
| Minekube | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
| OpenAIP | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
| roclub GmbH | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
| CEEX AG | Self-declared adopter | ADOPTERS.md |
The file also lists Dribdat, Micromate, Smat.io, hirschengraben, and D1V.AI. At the Series A in 2022 the company claimed more than 150 customers (Series A), but those organizations are not individually named in a public source.
Adoption signals
Measured from the GitHub API on 2026-06-22 (repo metadata):
- Stars: 14,138
- Forks: 1,121
- Open issues: 1,083
- Watchers: 61
- Contributors: about 246 (non-anonymous, by API pagination)
Release cadence is active, with point releases on the v4 line in mid-2026 (repo). At the 2022 Series A the project reported 10k+ stars and 200+ contributors (Series A), so the trend since then is steady growth.
ZITADEL is not in the CNCF landscape as a hosted project at any maturity level (CNCF Landscape, checked 2026-06-22). Its closest competitor Keycloak entered CNCF incubation in 2023, a deliberate contrast the maintainers have written about (Open Source in the AI Era).
Ecosystem
ZITADEL implements OpenID Connect (certified), OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0, and a SCIM 2.0 provisioning server (API introduction). Actions v2 provides webhooks, custom code, and token enrichment as extension hooks. Around the core there are language SDKs, a Helm chart and Terraform provider, and a Kubernetes operator for self-hosting (README.md:117). ZITADEL Cloud is the managed offering and runs the same codebase as the self-hosted distribution.
Alternatives
| Alternative | Differs by |
|---|---|
| Keycloak | Java/Quarkus, CNCF incubating, the broadest feature set including acting as an LDAP server; heavier to run |
| Ory (Hydra + Kratos) | Go, headless API-first microservices you compose yourself; no bundled admin UI or built-in multi-tenancy |
| Authentik | Python/TypeScript, strong flow-based UI, can serve LDAP and forward-auth; less event-sourced auditing |
| FusionAuth | Commercial-friendly single binary, free tier, not fully open source |
| Auth0 / Okta | SaaS only, not self-hostable, no open source code |
Pick ZITADEL when you want self-hostable B2B multi-tenancy, an event-sourced audit trail exposed over APIs, and SaaS/self-host parity. Pick Keycloak or Authentik when you need ZITADEL to act as an LDAP server, which it does not do (skycloak comparison, houseoffoss comparison).