Cloud IAM vs Okta
Cloud IAM is a European alternative to Okta: same security & identity use case, headquartered in France and governed by EU GDPR, while Okta is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
Managed Keycloak service deployed in 20 minutes: 70+ regions across 5 cloud providers, 99.95% SLA, 500+ customers, and 100% European support team.
- Jurisdiction
- EU / EEA
- Primary privacy law
- EU GDPR
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- No
- Free tier
- No
Okta is the identity layer large organisations standardise on, wiring single sign-on and user provisioning across thousands of applications, and two thirds of the Fortune 100 run on it. It is priced per user with a trial rather than a free tier. Okta, Inc. is publicly listed and headquartered in San Francisco, so the employee directory sits under American law.
- Jurisdiction
- United States
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Cloud IAM vs Okta at a glance
| Cloud IAM | Okta | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | France | United States |
| Data jurisdiction | EU / EEA | United States |
| Primary privacy law | EU GDPR | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Best for | Teams that need security & identity built for European data-protection requirements | Teams already invested in the Okta ecosystem |
Choose Cloud IAM if…
- You want a provider governed by a European privacy regime
- GDPR or public-sector data-protection requirements apply to you
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with Okta if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the Okta ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Cloud IAM
Cloud-IAM is a fully managed Keycloak service that takes the operational burden out of identity and access management. Deploy a production-grade Keycloak instance in under 20 minutes, without managing infrastructure, patches, or backups.
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Europe, Cloud-IAM serves 500+ customers with 20M+ managed users across a 100% in-house European team. The service spans 70+ regions across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Scaleway, and Outscale, giving teams the cloud provider and data residency they need.
Key features:
- Instant deployment with fully provisioned Keycloak in 20 minutes, free to start
- Multi-cloud reach across 70+ regions and 5 providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, Scaleway, Outscale)
- High availability backed by a 99.95% SLA and 99.9834% measured uptime in 2025
- Standards-based with OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, and custom SPI support
- Data portability via full import/export for complete credential sovereignty
- 24/7 European support from an on-call team based entirely in Europe
- Compliance spanning ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, NIS 2, HDS, and SecNumCloud 3.2
Built on Keycloak (Red Hat-backed open source), Cloud-IAM adds enterprise reliability, SLA guarantees, and European support without the ops overhead.
Why choose Cloud IAM over Okta?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. Okta is headquartered in the United States, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Cloud IAM removes that overhead. As a France-based provider, it operates under EU GDPR, and data stays inside the EU/EEA by default. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.