EJBCA

EJBCA is open-source public key infrastructure software and one of the most widely deployed certificate authorities available, offered in a free Community edition and a commercial Enterprise edition. The distinguishing technical claim is platform independence combined with scalability in both directions, which the vendor contrasts explicitly with other open-source certificate authority and PKI projects.

Scaling down matters as much as scaling up, and it is the less obvious half. An organisation that needs an internal certificate authority for a few hundred devices should not have to operate infrastructure designed for a national identity scheme, and PKI software that only makes sense at large scale pushes smaller teams towards ad hoc self-signed certificates that nobody tracks.

The published use cases are concrete: issuing TLS and mTLS certificates, issuing certificates for container environments, digital identities for IoT products, secure device identity in industrial cybersecurity, and automation and deployment of EJBCA itself. Mutual TLS deserves attention because it is the mechanism by which services authenticate each other rather than merely encrypting traffic, and it requires a certificate authority the organisation controls, which is exactly what a private PKI provides.

Post-quantum cryptography is treated as available now rather than as a roadmap item, with a PQC Lab Test Drive on Azure for issuing quantum-safe certificates, signing and timestamping. That is worth exploring even for organisations with no immediate migration plan, because understanding how quantum-safe certificates behave in your own environment is cheaper to learn before the migration than during it.

Community edition is downloadable from Docker Hub, GitHub or the project site, and the vendor publishes an explicit Community versus Enterprise comparison, which is the document to read first since the boundary between free and paid determines whether the open-source route is viable for your requirements. Contributor documentation, licences and learning resources are published. The Community edition carries no licence cost.