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Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

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Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#12

I did find amusing that one of the talking point is to not have to trust AWS with your auth, but you offer a SaaS. (I haven't read details of the SaaS, maybe all data is still hosted outside of your service, but I would doubt it.) Not a problem, but a bit of a contradiction. OTOH, SaaS does alleviate some pain.

Yea for those that do not trust a third party, we also offer a self hosted version in which all the data is stored in your own db.

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#13
post #8

We’re using Keycloak.org which is a great product, easy to use, a lot of functionality (if you want to), deplorable “on-premise” and does offer everything what you expect from modern user authentication and management system. You should check that out, user auth is indeed a solved problem.

Keycloak is a worthy alternative, no doubt. There are a few reasons we built SuperTokens - despite knowing about Keycloak:

We've taken a modular approach which is different from most. This enables you to only pick the features you want for your use case and not worry about unnecessarily complexity.

We provide far more flexibility and options on the frontend as well

KeyCloak is a small part of the Redhat (and even less significant for IBM, the owner of Redhat). For us, our team and company is 100% dedicated to building auth. Its do or die for us. While this may not sound tangible, we'll constantly be innovating (and hopefully out executing keycloak).

Keycloak does not offer a hosted version of the offering. In our opinion, a hosted open source product is still quite distinct from a proprietary SaaS product.

We provide the most robust solution for managing session tokens. We mitigate against all types of attacks and detect token theft using rotating refresh tokens. One of our libraries to solve for edge cases (browser tabs lock) is actually used by Auth0 as well and has 250K weekly downloads on npm.

Finally - in general, we've had feedback from Keycloak users that they've had a poor experience deploying and managing Keycloak and would switch to a good alternative, if there was one. I understand that this was not true for you.

If you do get the opportunity and decide to try out supertokens, we'd love to hear about how your experience compares between the two.

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#15
I got experience mainly with firebase and identity server. What is the usecase for supertoken instead something like identity server for .net, whatever Java spring uses or something like django or flasks authentication?

I’m far from an expert, but in past startups I’ve been scrambling to get SSO working for b2b saas, they bluntly said. Without sso we don’t want to use your service. So that was moved up our roadmap.

Even something like e-mail verification is something I will not go without anymore. It’s mandatory in some countries.

Honestly, next service that I will build will just be federated or magic email link if I can get away with it.

From the frontpage I cannot understand yet what makes this easier then the options above. Is this something you would use for your first 3000 customers? Imagine being the cto, when would I feel confident going for something like supertoken?

Also, it’s easy to ask questions like this, less so than building amazing things, so definitely Congratulations on the announcement!

Re: Sick of spending time on Auth, we built an open source 'Stripe for Auth'

#17
post #6

Sick of spending your time on auth, you decided to spend all your time on it?

Haha we both did laugh at this one.

I mean we were sick of doing it when we trying to build a product whos core value prop was different because auth was a distraction. We wanted to focus. Now that we're focussing ON auth, we are happy to do it cause it is the core product

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