warrant-demo-app-ts VS Ory Oathkeeper

We’re Aditya and Karan, the co-founders of Warrant (https://warrant.dev/). We build APIs and infrastructure that helps developers implement authorization and access control in their apps.

Implementing flexible authorization that grows with your application is difficult. Many products only need authentication early on but eventually require authorization; however, adding complex authorization to a mature, high usage product is even harder. We’re building Warrant to better abstract the complexity of authorization and reduce implementation cost and maintenance drag for engineering teams.

Warrant abstracts your authorization rules and access control logic outside of your application so it isn’t coupled to core business logic. We adopted concepts from Google Zanzibar to make Warrant flexible enough to support any access control model. Authorization rules are easy to enforce in backend and frontend code at runtime through simple API calls. Both developers and non-technical users can modify access rules through our dashboard to change application behavior without needing to change code.

We’re taking a service-driven approach to authorization. As companies get bigger and build out multiple services, authorization logic needs to be re-implemented in the new services or some central service. Whether you’re a small startup with a monolith or a company with many microservices, we think decoupling your authorization and having a dedicated authorization service is the right approach. Check out our demo app (https://github.com/warrant-dev/warrant-demo-app-ts) for an end-to-end example of how to use Warrant.

Hydra feels mature. I think it's their longest-developed product so far. Besides breaking changes during big upgrades(v0 -> v1beta -> v1), everything has been painless:

- It runs anywhere with or without containers

- API makes sense, good SDKs are available in all my used languages

- RAM usage is surprisingly low compared to usage and has been great for resource-constrained environments

- Stateless means horizontal scaling is as easy as `replicas++`

- Sub-millisecond response times for some calls, much faster than our previous setup

With Hydra, I know it's the client's fault when OAuth calls fail and not just a buggy server implementation. This is reinforced in dev mode with great errors like:

- The authorization code has already been used

- The request is missing the response_type parameter

- Parameter "nonce" must be set when using the implicit flow

- Redirect URL "https://example.com/callback" does not match

On the flipside, Oathkeeper is not a mature product and has not yet reached v1. There are breaking changes planned [1]. It lacks support for at least one popular usecase (mine) out of the box [2]. Rules can be hard to create and debug. I wouldn't recommend Oathkeeper in its current state unless you're ready to dive in and fix things yourself. Once configured it sticks with the Ory trend: fast, lean, and stable.

Depending on your usecase, Oathkeeper could be swapped out with any IAP like Pomerium or just with your reverse proxy's auth request support + some small custom shim.

I haven't tried Keto (access control) or Kratos (user management) yet. Kratos is on my todo list.

[1] https://github.com/ory/oathkeeper/issues/441