Your identity infrastructure is too important to rent from someone else indefinitely.
Gluu is an open source, enterprise-grade identity and access management platform. You own your data, you control your infrastructure, and you are never held hostage by a vendor's pricing decisions or roadmap.
An enterprise IAM platform you actually own.
Gluu is a commercially supported, open source identity and access management platform used by enterprises, universities, government agencies, and banks around the world. It handles both workforce identity, managing who your employees are and what they can access, and customer identity, managing how millions of end users authenticate with your applications.
Think of Gluu as a digital bouncer that sits at the front door of all your applications. Employees and customers show up once, prove who they are, and Gluu silently tells every system behind the scenes whether to let them in and what they are allowed to do. Unlike most IAM platforms, you run Gluu on your own infrastructure. Your user data never leaves your environment, you are not subject to per-user pricing that scales unpredictably, and you can customise the platform to handle workflows that commercial SaaS vendors simply will not support.
Why organisations outgrow commercial IAM platforms.
Pricing that scales against you
Most commercial IAM platforms charge per user or per authentication. As your user base grows, your costs grow with it. For organisations managing millions of customer identities or large internal workforces, this becomes a significant and unpredictable line item.
Vendor lock-in with no exit
Proprietary IAM platforms store your identity data in formats and infrastructure you do not control. Migrating away is expensive and disruptive. When the vendor raises prices, changes terms, or discontinues features, you have limited options.
Data sovereignty requirements that SaaS cannot meet
Regulated industries and government organisations often cannot send identity data to third-party cloud providers. When your compliance requirements mean your data must stay in your own environment, most commercial IAM platforms simply are not an option.
Gluu handles both workforce and customer identity.
Most IAM platforms are built for one or the other. Gluu handles both, which matters for organisations that need a single, consistent identity infrastructure rather than separate tools for employees and customers.
Workforce identity
Secure access for employees, contractors, and administrators across all internal applications and services
Customer identity (CIAM)
Scalable identity management for millions of external users accessing your customer-facing applications
Three ways to deploy Gluu.
Gluu offers deployment options that match your operational model, whether you want full control of your own infrastructure or a managed service that removes the operational burden.
Gluu Solo
Managed Gluu Flex hosted on Google's serverless infrastructure. The power of Flex without the operational overhead.
Gluu Flex
Self-hosted, enterprise-grade IAM platform. Full operational control, air-gapped deployment support, and commercial support subscription.
Gluu 4 Community
The open source distribution for organisations that want to self-host with community support and no commercial subscription required.
Everything you need to manage identity at scale.
Single sign-on
One login for every application your users need to reach, whether internal tools, cloud services, or customer-facing applications. Gluu acts as a central identity provider that every connected application trusts.
Multi-factor authentication
Built-in support for passkeys, TOTP, SMS OTP, hardware tokens, and Super Gluu, Gluu's own push notification app. You can also integrate third-party MFA solutions into the authentication flow.
Adaptive authentication
Gluu evaluates risk signals in real time and adjusts the authentication requirement accordingly. High-risk login attempts, unusual locations, or suspicious behaviour can trigger additional verification steps automatically.
Federated identity
Gluu can act as an identity provider for your own applications and as a consumer of trusted external identity providers. This enables federated access across partner organisations and trusted third-party systems without sharing credentials.
User lifecycle management
Add, edit, and manage users, groups, and attributes through a central administration interface. Integrate with existing LDAP directories and Active Directory environments to avoid duplicating identity data.
Token-based access control
Gluu's TBAC capability enables developers to build applications with fine-grained, token-based authorisation policies. Enforce access decisions in browser applications, mobile apps, and cloud microservices using JWT-based policies.
Built on the standards that matter, not proprietary protocols.
Gluu holds more OpenID Provider certifications than any other platform. Building on open standards means Gluu integrates with any application that speaks those protocols, without custom connectors or proprietary APIs.
Gluu is built for organisations that need ownership and scale.
Banks and financial institutions
Banks need to manage both workforce identity for thousands of employees and customer identity for millions of account holders. Gluu handles both under one platform, with the data sovereignty controls that financial regulators require and the customisation needed for complex authentication journeys like two-person approval for high-value transactions.
Government and public sector
Government agencies managing citizen digital identity services need a platform they can run entirely within their own environment, with no dependency on foreign cloud infrastructure. Gluu's air-gapped deployment model and open source architecture make it one of the few platforms that genuinely meets these requirements.
Universities and education
Large educational institutions managing student and staff identities across a diverse application estate need flexible, cost-effective IAM. Gluu's open source model removes per-user licensing costs that make commercial platforms impractical at scale, and its federated identity support enables collaboration with partner institutions.
Large enterprises with complex requirements
Organisations with unique authentication workflows, multiple business units, or the need to customise beyond what a SaaS vendor will support benefit most from Gluu's open source flexibility. If you need something that commercial platforms say they cannot do, Gluu almost certainly can.
How a typical engagement looks
Assessment
Design
Deploy
Integrate
Migrate
Support
Compliance
Frequently Asked Questions
Gluu is an open-source enterprise identity and access management platform, deployable on-premises or in the cloud. It handles authentication, authorisation and single sign-on for an organisation's applications and users at scale.
Open-source IAM gives an organisation reviewable source code, no per-user licensing cliff as headcount grows, and freedom from a single vendor's roadmap. For identity infrastructure — which is expensive and disruptive to replace — avoiding lock-in carries more weight than it does elsewhere in the stack.
Yes. Gluu runs on-premises, in the cloud, or across both. On-premises deployment keeps identity data inside an organisation's own infrastructure, which is often mandatory for government and financial services in jurisdictions with data residency requirements.
Gluu is built on open identity standards including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and SAML, so it federates with existing applications and identity providers rather than requiring them to be replaced. Standards support is what makes incremental migration possible.
Gluu suits organisations with substantial user populations, custom or legacy applications, and requirements that commercial SaaS identity platforms handle awkwardly — particularly where data must remain in-country or the deployment must be independently auditable.
The Kernel distributes Gluu across the UAE, Middle East, Africa and CIS, with regional technical support for architecture design, deployment and integration. Open-source licensing does not remove the need for implementation expertise, which is where distribution support matters most.
Ready to own your identity infrastructure?
Talk to our team. We will help you understand whether Gluu is the right fit for your organisation and what a deployment in your environment would look like.
