Keycard - 2026 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Keycard is a runtime authorization platform designed for AI agents in enterprise environments. It provides dynamic identity verification, policy based access control, and just in time credential issuance. The solution addresses security challenges related to managing agent access to production systems by verifying each request, evaluating it against defined policies, and issuing credentials when access is approved. The platform is suitable for organizations deploying AI agents at scale, particularly in sectors with stringent security requirements such as financial services, technology, and enterprises managing complex multi agent systems that interact with sensitive data stores, APIs, and internal resources.

Keycard operates through a four stage authorization workflow that captures full request context, manages resource availability, grants access dynamically, and provides real time activity monitoring. The platform verifies both the identity of the requesting agent and its runtime environment, and captures the user identity when the agent acts on behalf of a user to establish a composite identity for authorization decisions. Resources are configured once by specifying credential providers, including Keycard Vault, delegated OAuth tokens, scoped access tokens, and stored API tokens. At runtime each credential request is evaluated against policies written in Cedar language and, if approved, Keycard issues short lived authorization tokens scoped to the specific task with configurable validity periods. The system delivers comprehensive audit capabilities via a real time dashboard that displays all authorization events, including approvals and denials, with full attribution of the agent, user, resource, and policy rules that determined each decision.

Keycard integrates into existing infrastructure through three enforcement points to accommodate different architectural requirements. The application level integration leverages SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go to add authentication, authorization, and delegated API access directly to agents or MCP servers with minimal code changes. The gateway integration option enables deployment of Keycard as a broker that handles authentication and authorization across agents, clients, and resources without modifying existing services. The infrastructure level integration deploys a sidecar proxy within agent sandboxes to intercept outbound traffic and exchange placeholder secrets for actual user scoped tokens from Keycard, ensuring agents never hold actual credentials. The platform federates with existing identity providers, including Okta, Microsoft Entra, Google Workspace, Auth Zero, GitHub, GitLab, and SAML based systems, allowing organizations to leverage their current identity infrastructure. The system supports zero standing credentials architecture to eliminate long lived access tokens.

Keycard exports audit events in OCSF format compatible with major SIEM tools such as Splunk, Datadog, and Sumo Logic, or directly to Amazon S three buckets for custom ingestion pipelines. The platform maintains SOC II Type II compliance and provides credential revocation capabilities that immediately deny subsequent authorization requests wherever the revoked credential applies. The system records all policy decisions with detailed context, including timestamps, outcomes, denial reasons, and policy rules that determined each decision. Organizations can inspect sessions filtered by application, user, or resource to obtain full visibility into issued credentials, their scope, validity periods, and the access model used. An API is provided for programmatic management of resources, policies, and audit log retrieval to integrate with existing DevOps and security workflows.