fusionauth-issues VS Keycloak

Gotcha. We definitely don't have fine granularity around when MFA is required (open issue here: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/2285 ).

Other than that I'd suggest putting a page in front of our login pages with the domain logic, and modeling each set of emails as either an application, organization or tenant, depending on the specific features you need.

Either way, hope you find the right solution for your needs!

Great question. Appreciate the interest.

I can only speak from my perspective as an employee, not the whole company. It is something I've thought about. I will also ask the CEO/founder or other leaders to weigh in.

Many devs care about open source when they are evaluating a solution, but many really want "free as in beer". They want to try a product without getting out the credit card or engaging with sales. We cater to the latter category, which wants to understand the product quality without talking to any sales people.

Some of these folks use our community product for their production needs, which is perfectly fine. We have people running FusionAuth in production with 1000s of tenants or 10000+ applications. (I always say they "pay" us by filing bug reports, giving feedback and voting on feature requests.)

But some decide they want to pay us for hosting, support or advanced features. Those choices help us build a business.

Devs, and especially buyers, are interested in sustainability of a product they are going to integrate into their system. An auth provider isn't a javascript widget that you can easily drop in or remove from your system. It embeds in your system, even if you stick to a standard like OIDC, and is difficult to switch from, especially at scale. You want to be sure the company and product is going to stick around. (If you want to make sure you can run the product even if everyone at FusionAuth wins the lottery, we do offer source code escrow for a price, but haven't had anyone take us up on it.)

FusionAuth is a profitable company (we did recently raise a round to accelerate growth, you can read more about that here [0]). Open source companies often have a hard time meeting the profit goals of the market or investors. This is a known issue and often results in relicensing or changing the rules, as we've seen with Hashicorp[1] and Elastic[2]. This switcheroo can cause issues, confusion, and ill-will; FusionAuth's licensing avoids that.

FusionAuth also develops in the open[3]. This open development process gives us another common benefit people get from OSS--community feedback.

Also, I don't want to throw shade at Ory and Zitadel, since I have no idea about their finances (apart from a brief look at Crunchbase, which shows they've raised 22.5M[4] and 2.5M[5] respectively). I hope they're building sustainable businesses, but selling closed source software is a sure route to a profitable business that has built many big companies (including in the auth space, such as Okta or Auth0). Again, this is not FUD (or at least I don't intend it to be!), just an honest assessment at the difficulties of making money in open source dev tools [6].

We also compete on features, support and documentation. Again, I can't speak to Ory or Zitadel; they look nice, but I haven't built anything with them, so it is hard for me to know how good they are. I do know that we have had many clients appreciate of those aspects of our product.

To sum up:

* FusionAuth has a free option, which helps reduce friction and gives some of the benefits of OSS. The open process and escrow also give some of the benefits of OSS.

* Some devs and buyers care about business sustainability, especially when integrating a tool deeply into their application. FusionAuth will never have to worry about relicensing a version because AWS is eating our SaaS revenue stream, for example.

* We offer great support, documentation and intricate auth features at a reasonable price.

Hope this helps.

0: https://fusionauth.io/blog/fusionauth-and-updata

1: https://www.hashicorp.com/license-faq

2: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing

3: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/

4: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ory/company_overview...

5: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zitadel

6: I wrote about this a few years ago on my personal blog: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3438

Disclosure, I work for FusionAuth.

> Multi-tenant (each of my customers gets a fully separate directory, with access to all tenants for our admins)

Yup.

> SAML and OAuth (customers can set up SAML themselves via the SaaS interface, or we set the SP up for them)

You'd have to build an interface using our APIs for this. Not available out of the box, but we do have it in the general roadmap (https://github.com/fusionauth/fusionauth-issues/issues/91 is the tracking issue).

> Rule based group assignment based on SAML attribute evaluation (e.g. assign users to this group if the attribute X = Y)

You could do this with Lambda HTTP Connect (a paid feature) or webhooks (a free feature. https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/lambdas/#using-lambda-htt... has more

> APIs to manage users, groups, organisations (tenants)

Yup.

My employer (FusionAuth) has the same feature in our community edition and it's quite popular: https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/passwordless/magic-links

It is glorious from the user perspective, but there are actually some subtleties from the implementation perspective that caused us some grief.

First of all, you have email configuration and deliverability. The answer is to outsource it to a provider like Sendgrid, SES, or Mailgun.

Then, there's anti phishing email software which can expire one time tokens as it probes to prevent phishing attacks. More on how we built around that here: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/629

> just invalidate them after use

I can't speak for Stytch, but I know at $CURJOB, we have run into issues with this where corporate phishing protection software invalidates one time use codes. I believe it does that because it retrieves links in emails before the user clicks on them. This was an issue several of our customers have raised. So it isn't as straightforward as you might think.

There's more details, including the workaround we ended up using, on the GH issue: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/629

PS I agree they should absolutely have guidance around link lifetime as well as safe defaults. Converting the links to one-time use seems like a good start.

Such a great idea! I filed a feature request on our GH issues list to implement this: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1888

Another issue that I don't see covered here is that some email clients (looking at you, Outlook) pre-fetch links to see if they are security risks. If you build a magic link system which handles plain old GETs, the one time code gets used up before the user can actually log in.

We ran into this at FusionAuth and had to do implement some workarounds, documented here: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/629#i...

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081192 mentions some other issues.

We do, extensively, both internally and externally. In fact, we don't have any other explicit way to order engineering work. (There's always the "inside the CTO's head" priority list, but we strive to get that into GH issues.)

https://github.com/fusionauth/fusionauth-issues/issues is our main external facing repo. We use it:

* to track issues. Every code change should tie back to an issue in this repo.

* to get feedback from the community. People can upvote issues that are important to them.

* to take input from the community. If someone wants a feature added or a bug fixed, we ask them to file an issue. This is a desired bit of friction (if you can't be bothered to file an issue, then you probably don't care that much).

* to expose the near term roadmap to customers and community members (we do this using milestones)

* to expose our decision making and prioritization process. We've had customers say they loved that about our product. The product is not open source, but the development process is as transparent as we can make it (see https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1577 for example).

It's great for all those things. On to your concerns:

* bug reporting: yes, but make sure you use templates

* sprint/epic management: okay for that. Not easy to tie bugs together in any structured way (we use a 'related bugs' section of the issue description, but that depends on frail humans to keep it up to date)

* release management (from development, to code review, to QE verification, to release): less familiar with this, I know there is a kanban view that we've used. Milestones are useful here.

* integration with non-engineering teams (ie, letting customer support/customer success tag issues that customers have brought up): as long as they are GH knowledgeable, it'll work.

From my limited jira experience, it's much more powerful when you have teams of teams and need reporting and customization. But for a team our size (<10 engineers), GH issues has been great.

This is our major need right now:

https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/1393

Basically, providing a static IP to some EC2 instance traffic so that folks can add an IP to their firewall.

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to secure a Vue.js Web application. We're going to leverage oidc-client-ts to integrate OIDC authentication with the Vue app. The oidc-client-ts package is a well-maintained and used library. It provides a lot of utilities for building out a fully production app.

Keycloak has been a leader in the Identity and Access Management world since its launch almost 8 years ago. It is an open-source offering under the stewardship of Red Hat

It sounds like what you're looking for is an identity provider.

A popular open source option is https://www.keycloak.org/

This application can manage your users, then you can use standards like OpenID or SAML to plug it into your application, of which there are usually many plugins to accomplish this depending on your tech stack.

KeyCloak is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that offers enterprise IAM solutions. Keycloak emphasizes proficient enterprise authorization solutions by providing:

Outline only uses SSO for authentication. The solution when self hosting is use a private keycloak server [1]. This allows you to do email based auth.

[1] https://www.keycloak.org/

> Keycloak was good but has too much legacy for 10+ years.

I got curious, actually seems to check out and explains why it's so well documented (but also complex and oftentimes confusing):

> The first production release of Keycloak was in September 2014, with development having started about a year earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keycloak

https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/releases/tag/1.0.0.Fina...

> Don't outsource either your authentication or authorization. Run it in-house.

This is hard to do, though. I hope people here will drop a lot of combinations that work for them!

Personally, for a small/medium scale project, I went with:

Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/

It supports various backing RDBMSes (like PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL and others), allows both users that you persist in your own DB, as well as various external sources, like social login across various platforms, is an absolute pain to configure and sometimes acts in stupid ways behind a reverse proxy, but has most of the features that you might ever want, which sadly comes coupled with some complexity and an enterprise feeling.

I quite like that it offers the login/registration views that you need with redirects, as well as user management, storing roles/permissions and other custom attributes. It's on par with what you'd expect and should serve you nicely.

mod_auth_openidc: https://github.com/OpenIDC/mod_auth_openidc

This one's a certified OpenID Connect Relying Party implementation for... Apache2/httpd.

Some might worry about the performance and there are other options out there (like a module for OpenResty, which is built on top of Nginx), but when coupled with mod_md Apache makes for a great reverse proxy/ingress for my personal needs.

The benefit here is that I don't need 10 different implementations for each service/back end language that's used, I can outsource the heavy lifting to mod_auth_openidc (protected paths, needed roles/permissions, redirect URLs, token renewal and other things) and just read a few trusted headers behind the reverse proxy if further checks are needed, which is easy in all technologies.

That said, the configuration there is also hard and annoying to do, as is working with OpenID Connect in general, even though you can kind of understand why that complexity is inherent. Here's a link with some certified implementations, by the way: https://openid.net/developers/certified-openid-connect-imple...

You couldn't pay me to use their bullshit...if you need an identity server/provider go with Keycloak. Open source, free, and standards based, works better and scales better too.

#docker-compose.yml version: '3' volumes: postgres_data: driver: local services: postgres: container_name: postgres image: postgres:15-alpine restart: unless-stopped volumes: - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data - ./init/db:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ command: postgres -c wal_level=logical ports: - '5433:5432' environment: POSTGRES_DB: ${POSTGRES_DB} POSTGRES_USER: ${POSTGRES_USER} POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD} hasura: container_name: hasura image: hasura/graphql-engine:v2.29.0 restart: unless-stopped depends_on: - postgres # - keycloak ports: - '6080:8080' volumes: - ./hasura/metadata:/hasura-metadata environment: ## postgres database to store Hasura metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_METADATA_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/hasura_metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB} HASURA_GRAPHQL_LOG_LEVEL: warn ## enable the console served by server HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE: 'true' # set to "false" to disable console ## enable debugging mode. It is recommended to disable this in production HASURA_GRAPHQL_DEV_MODE: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLED_LOG_TYPES: startup, http-log, webhook-log, websocket-log, query-log ## enable jwt secret when keycloak realm is ready # HASURA_GRAPHQL_JWT_SECRET: '{ "type": "RS256", "jwk_url": "http://keycloak:8080/realms/development/protocol/openid-connect/certs" }' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET: ${HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET} HASURA_GRAPHQL_UNAUTHORIZED_ROLE: anonymous HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_REMOTE_SCHEMA_PERMISSIONS: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_MIGRATIONS_SERVER_TIMEOUT: 30 # To view tables in Postgres # pgweb: # container_name: pgweb # image: sosedoff/pgweb:latest # restart: unless-stopped # ports: # - '8081:8081' # environment: # - DATABASE_URL=postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}?sslmode=disable # depends_on: # - postgres keycloak: container_name: keycloak image: quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:22.0.5 command: ['start-dev'] # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # command: ['start-dev', '--import-realm'] environment: ## https://www.keycloak.org/server/all-config KEYCLOAK_ADMIN: admin KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD: password123 KC_DB: postgres KC_DB_PASSWORD: postgres_pass KC_DB_USERNAME: postgres KC_DB_SCHEMA: public KC_DB_URL: jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/keycloak_db KC_HOSTNAME: localhost ports: - 8090:8080 depends_on: - postgres # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # volumes: # - ./realm-export.json:/opt/keycloak/data/import/realm.json:ro