In the ever-evolving world of digital identity, choosing the right auth provider is pivotal for businesses. We get it, it's really tempting to build your own auth solution. Even if you choose to buy it rather than build it, you're faced with a lot of options.
Why Find an Auth0 Alternative?
Auth0 is a popular customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform that provides authentication and authorization services for web and mobile applications. It supports a wide range of features like Single Sign-On (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), social logins, and more. However, developers have started looking for alternatives to Auth0 due to pricing concerns, a desire for more customization, and a lack of support. This is especially true since Auth0's acquisition by Okta in 2021.
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The Top 8 Auth0 Alternatives
We talked before about what Auth0 offers. However, in the world of auth providers, these are table stakes. Auth0 provides SSO, MFA, and more...but so does everyone else. What sets providers apart these days are factors rather than features. Pricing, setup time, customization options, and migration options all come into play in the decision to find an alternative to Auth0.
Those are the factors that this guide will focus on. In this guide, we'll give a quick overview of each service. But we'll also call out how much they cost, their setup times, and what it takes to get them running. It's also important to note whether a provider has had issues such as the Auth0 security incident in 2022.
FusionAuth
FusionAuth isn't your run-of-the-mill customer authentication and authorization platform. It is brimming with every feature your app could need, and then some. It's customizable, it's scalable, and it's got this uncanny ability to run on any platform. It's the Swiss Army knife of auth. We’re built for devs, by devs, and you’ll be supported by devs. Can you tell we speak dev?
- Pricing: Free for the Community plan. As low as $125 per month for self-hosted plans up to 10,000 users. Cloud hosting starts at $37 per month.
- Setup Time: As little as five minutes.
- Customization: FusionAuth offers a back end GUI, and API-based customization as well. You can create themes and assign them per tenant or application, customizing the experience for different users.
- Migration: FusionAuth's docs cover many migration methods and data sources, as well as implementation and special considerations. Any password hashing scheme is supported.
- Hosting: Self-hosted or single-tenant cloud.
- Get Started: Contact us for your custom quote, or buy your solution now.
Key Features: Developer focused, support from engineers, private cloud hosting, lower overall cost.
Keycloak
Keycloak is an open source, SSO CIAM solution for complex enterprise environments. It provides a unified security layer that can be used by both cloud and on-premises applications. It is relatively easy to set up and configure, making it a preferred choice for organizations that want to host their own Auth0 alternative.
- Pricing: Keycloak itself is open-source and requires no license fee. However, there are costs involved with server hardware, maintenance, and security updates.
- Setup Time: As quickly as you can work. However, a lack of support options could be a concern.
- Customization: Theme support via the Admin console.
- Migration: Keycloak does not provide a direct migration path.
- Hosting: Self-hosted or third-party hosting only.
Key Features: The primary differentiator for Keycloak is that it is an open-source, standards-based alternative to Auth0, thus with lower costs.
Cognito
Amazon Cognito is a service provided by AWS that offers easy to set up user sign-up, sign-in, and access control for web and mobile applications. It supports sign-in through social identity providers like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, as well as enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0. With the ability to scale to millions of users, Cognito is designed to be highly resilient and is built to require fewer resources to set up than some other providers.
- Pricing: The system is free to start. Though based on MAUs, you’ll have to calculate your own pricing in a potentially-confusing matrix.
- Setup Time: Cognito has a relatively quick setup time, with a setup wizard that can guide developers through the process in under an hour.
- Customization: Amazon Cognito supports minimal customization of UIs, workflows, and data synchronization tasks. It allows you to customize user pool workflows with AWS Lambda triggers and supports the ability to customize user data synchronization and user profiles.
- Migration: Migration from another authentication provider to Cognito can be done through AWS’s Migration Hub, which offers a step-by-step process to move user data and configurations.
- Hosting: Multi-tenant only.
Key Features: Cognito has great integration with other AWS services. You can authenticate a user and assign them an IAM role, allowing for direct, controlled access to AWS services like S3. It is serverless and scales without the need to manage other infrastructure elements.
Firebase
Google-owned Firebase is big. And does a lot of things. It's an app development platform that also contains authentication and authorization tools. No discussion of products owned by Google (Alphabet) is complete without also touching on the fact that the company has a history of sunsetting popular products without warning.
- Pricing: Free, up to 50k monthly users. Paid plans starting at $25 per month.
- Setup Time: Varies depending upon the platform and services that you want to use.
- Customization: Extensible, including a wide variety of messaging, email, and remote config.
- Migration: Google includes a wealth of documentation for moving data between projects. However, there is little information for migrating to Firebase from other providers.
- Hosting: Multi-tenant only.
Key Features: Google is relying on having a wide variety of developer-focused tools. These include performance monitors, analytics, A/B testing, and much more. Be aware that platforms with a lot of tools don't often do each one individually well.
Frontegg
Like most other auth providers, Frontegg offers robust, scalable user management. However, the company puts its focus almost entirely on B2B SaaS applications. The company is new, and has had some growing pains such as a recent service outage, but it is rising in use across B2B SaaS businesses.
- Pricing: Starts at $99 per month, up to 1,000 users.
- Setup Time: Frontegg touts itself as being "ready in hours, not months."
- Customization: Allows for custom styling, as well as custom admin portal modules.
- Migration: Frontegg supports imports of Bcrypt, Scrypt and Firebase hashed passwords.
- Hosting: Multi-tenant only.
Key Features: Built for and around B2B SaaS, Frontegg is a top choice for many of these businesses looking to migrate from Auth0.
Stytch
Like many vendors, Stytch focuses its offerings on its APIs and a library of SDKs. The company's website touts its ability to work with frontend, frontend headless, and backend API SDKs. Compared to Auth0, Stytch offers some features on lower tiers, and offers complete support for biometrics as well as web3 logins.
- Pricing: Free to start, up to 5k MAUs. $249 to remove branding and enable customization.
- Setup Time: Because of the extensive options for setup, timing can take a bit longer than other providers.
- Customization: APIs and SDKs allow for custom experiences for paid plans.
- Migration: Stytch offers documentation for migrating from some major auth providers, including Auth0, Cognito, and Firebase.
- Hosting: Multi-tenant only.
Key Features: The founders of Stytch built the product with startups in mind. The company focuses on branding control, and provides a "four nines'' SLA for Enterprise customers.
WorkOS
WorkOS is a platform designed to make your application enterprise-ready with just a few lines of code. It serves as a set of building blocks for swiftly adding enterprise features to your application, providing a unified interface that abstracts numerous enterprise integrations, and supports a multitude of programming languages and environments.
- Pricing: Starting at $125 per month for a single SSO or Directory Sync connection.
- Setup Time: WorkOS touts its ability to add features quickly. But the company does offer more than auth. The initial setup may take extensive time given the options that you choose to include.
- Customization: Limited, though WorkOS does offer admin portal branding.
- Migration: WorkOS does not specify methods for migrating from other auth providers.
- Hosting: Multi-tenant only.
Key Features: WorkOS focuses solely on the enterprise. That's not to say that you have to be an enterprise-level company to use it. Rather, its aim is for those companies that will sell to enterprise customers.
Open Source Alternatives to Auth0
We would be remiss to discuss Auth0 alternatives without also pointing out that there are open source options. Open source is often the area of discussion when looking for single-tenant, private cloud hosting. This is a key differentiator for FusionAuth. We are the only major provider that allows for self-hosted or single-tenant cloud hosting.
We did cover Keycloak earlier in this article, but that needed its own mention specifically because of its focus on complex enterprise environments.
Authelia: Authelia occupies an interesting space that you could think of as a more useful version of .htaccess. It isn't an SSO provider itself, per se. Rather, it is a layer that sits in front of other services that may have their own authn system.
Authentik: If you're looking for simplicity, it's hard to beat Authentik. The project focuses on being easy to use, includes full OAuth and SAML support, as well as support for applications that don't offer native support for SSO.
Hanko: Auth, user management, and biometrics. If you're looking at Hanko, you'll find an easy-to-use, biometric-capable auth platform that you can start using for free. When you move into production, you can continue with Hanko for as little as $9 per month.
Supertokens: SuperTokens is an open-source authentication solution to Auth0 that offers self-hosted login pages with a prebuilt UI. The company stands out in the open source world by its $300 million fund raised by its users. However, its authentication options are limited.
Ory.sh: Ory is another open source Auth0 alternative that is worth mentioning. Ory focuses on having a modular platform where you can add or remove options as you need them.
FusionAuth Is the Best Auth0 Alternative
Sure, we're biased. But for good reason. FusionAuth is built for devs by devs. That's why you'll never talk to some low-tier support person if you have a question. The same developers who make our product will be there to help you make it your own.
The problem with many of the newer providers in the landscape is that they are victims of their own success. For example, Okta spent a lot of money to buy Auth0. Now Auth0 customers are feeling that pinch through higher pricing, being nickel and dimed for features, and unreasonable MAU restrictions.
We built FusionAuth without any outside money. To this day, we continue to find our success as a profitable company that isn't beholden to investors. Most of our team are senior developers who have come from all manner of other companies. So they have the experience to help you build whatever you need.
User auth is too important to leave up to chance. It's a complex animal that you can build yourself, but then you also have to maintain it. Leave that work up to us. Sign up for the Community plan today and let's build something incredible.
