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Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

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Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#271
post #73

If anyone's looking for an Auth0 alternative, come check out WorkOS! It's like Stripe for enterprise features, including SSO/SAML, Directory/SCIM, and more. https://workos.com/docs (I'm the founder.) Edit: Here’s our launch last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607402

We are happy WorkOS customers at hopin.com :) their SDKs make integration dead easy and their team is super responsive. Thanks @grinich and all the WorkOS team!

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I found it hard to write integrations with Okta and ended up using Keycloak and integrating it as an OIDC client. I found Keycloak extremely easy to setup and work with.

I wish keycloak has smaller memory footprint so I can cram it in a small vps together with other small webapps. Other than that it's excellent.

Yeah, first time I tried to start it i set 128mb limit and got nothing at all, was a little surprised

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already true open source alternatives on the horizon such as https://github.com/ory It is about time for a new generation of identity systems in my opinion. This acquisition shows the risk of centralized, vendor locked-in services.

https://www.keycloak.org/ is another open source option. Compared to other choices, it's more mature and well-vetted because it forms the upstream for RedHat's SSO offering. On the other hand, it's a big monolithic Java app, but they are making some moves to be more CNF-friendly: https://www.keycloak.org/2020/12/first-keycloak-x-release.ad...

Yeah Keycloak is great. I've tried using other open source alternatives, but none are as full-featured and mature as Keycloak.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#276
I only hope and pray that Auth0 doesn't give up on their attention to documentation, examples, and just making it easy to get going with their ecosystem.

It took me a couple of hours to get a Spring Boot application to use Auth0 as an IDP and for ID federation to AzureAD, Google, Apple, and a few other IDPs. The documentation and examples are very comprehensive, and I like how they really get the day to day problems faced by developers.

Getting anything working with Okta on the other hand took ages longer, to the point that we gave up on them to move to Auth0.

In all, this acquisition is bittersweet for me.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#277
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're not fond of them? I have limited exposure. We use them at my place of work for 2fa for our VPN. And an organization we work with uses it for authentication. But I haven't had to use them in anything I've developed.

The idea of outsourced identity is just so contradictory it makes my blood pressure shoot up when people sincerely suggest it. I'll make an exception for Office 365 / AAD when an organization has already got their userbase added, but after that I'd wager if an org is big enough to need their own federated authX, then they're big enough to deploy IdentityServer and be done with it.

That's a bad wager to make. In B2B it's not unusual for small, under-resourced companies to have big customers that all require an integration with their own identity solutions.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#278

Does anyone else think its a horrible idea to outsource your companies authentication? Where I work we are migrating to Okta, and it blows my mind that anyone thinks it is a good idea.

It's no different than any other "build vs buy" decision. If you think you can provide your core offering AND implement complex authentication requirements half as well as a dedicated authentication-SaaS company, good luck. Businesses "buy" because it's the low-risk path.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#279
post #50

I hope this gives rise to another, smaller viable party outside of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Perhaps I'm jaded, perhaps hopelessly biased - but I can only see this as a net negative. Okta's open source packages receive a pitiful amount of attention (for example: https://github.com/okta/okta-oidc-js/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%... ) with forks almost becoming a requirement. Auth0 by contrast has been "on the ball" for…

Auth0's GitHub account and documentation basically sold me when I was comparing auth services.

Re: Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B

#280
Tragic. All Auth options are horrible and overpriced. From a presentation I did for a client a year ago for only 10,000 users:

Off-the-shelf auth cost comparison • Okta: $20,000 / month • Auth0: $1,500+ / month • These are barebones services - any customization would cost extra • There is still a large implementation code when using these services

Auth0 was worth using for midsize companies sometimes. Okta is not.

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