Authentik vs Authelia?
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I'm on my phone rn and can't write a longer post. This comment is to remind me to write an essay later. I've been using authentik heavily for my cybersecurity club and have a LOT of thoughts about it.
The tldr about authentik's risk of enshittification is that authentik follows a pattern I call "supportware". It's when extremely (intentionally/accidentally) complex software (intentionally/accidentally) lacks edge cases in their docs,because you are supposed to pay for support.
I think this is a sustainable business model, and I think keycloak has some similar patterns (and other Red Hat software).
The tldr about authentik itself is that it has a lot of features, but not all of them are relevant to your usecase, or worth the complexity. I picked up authentik for invites (which afaik are rare, also official docs about setting up invites were wrong, see supportware), but invites may not something you care about.
Anyway. Longer essay/rant later. Despite my problems, I still think authentik is the best for my usecase (cybersecurity club), and other options I've looked at like zitadel (seems to be more developer focused),or ldap + sso service (no invites afaik) are less than the best option.
Sidenote: Microsoft entra is offers similar features to what I want from authentik, but I wanted to self host everything.
I like the "supportware" term, I can apply that to a few other tools (airbyte, teleport).
I ended up setting up authentik today and it went really smoothly. So far I like it a lot, so hopefully the full enshittification process doesn't happen soon.
Even though right now I just want to use it for my own self-hosting purposes, I'm also interested in potentially using it for work. We have a few hundred thousand users and AWS cognito is getting pretty expensive. -
LDAP and ldaps are not great from a security perspective. They pass password though the application which means a single compromised app will create a full breach.
Better to use OpenID which uses a single sign on portal that tells the underlying app when authentication is successful. It has a much smaller attack surface and allows for much more flexibility.
Yep, this is what I'm looking for
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There’s also Zitadel: https://zitadel.com/
I tried it before authelia, and it felt like an unfinished product. Nice looking, but there were weird issues, like you could create projects (or apps? i don't remember) through the UI, but then if you wanted to delete them you had to use the API.
The hierarchy of resources also didn't really feel intuitive to me. But that's just personal preference.
I've been testing out authentik today and I really like it. I like that the UI works great, but there's also a terraform provider to manage things declaratively. -
You can try VoidAuth, it is kinda similar to Authelia+lldap. I am the developer and I created it because I wasn’t satisfied with Authelia’s user management. If you decide you want to try it and run into any issues or questions I will try to help
Thanks! I'll check it out
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I'm currently using Authelia to authenticate for some of my self hosted services. It works fine, but the limited user backends (ldap or... yaml??) make me want to look for an alternative.
Authentik seems good, but after looking at their website I get the feeling of imminent enshitification, where they're going to either pull the rug on the open source version, or basically gatekeep essential features behind an enterprise license.
So, for those using Authentik, how has your experience been so far?
I am using authelia as well for some time. At some point I was looking into kanidm. It looked promising, but never got into actually using it. I never figured out though, whether they support forward header auth.
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I'm currently using Authelia to authenticate for some of my self hosted services. It works fine, but the limited user backends (ldap or... yaml??) make me want to look for an alternative.
Authentik seems good, but after looking at their website I get the feeling of imminent enshitification, where they're going to either pull the rug on the open source version, or basically gatekeep essential features behind an enterprise license.
So, for those using Authentik, how has your experience been so far?
Take this with a grain of salt because I haven't started using this yet, but I am planning on using pocket id on my personal server
https://github.com/pocket-id/pocket-id
Seems to do what I want it to do
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I'm currently using Authelia to authenticate for some of my self hosted services. It works fine, but the limited user backends (ldap or... yaml??) make me want to look for an alternative.
Authentik seems good, but after looking at their website I get the feeling of imminent enshitification, where they're going to either pull the rug on the open source version, or basically gatekeep essential features behind an enterprise license.
So, for those using Authentik, how has your experience been so far?
On paper I should love Authelia, I'm a sucker for y'all configured services, I can write a couple of files on my Ansible and boom, everything works... However I never had much luck setting Authelia up, Authentik on the other hand was very painless (albeit) manual (via UI) configuration. I don't do anything crazy, so any of them would work for me though, I just failed on setting Authelia and tried Authentik and had had no reason to change.
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On paper I should love Authelia, I'm a sucker for y'all configured services, I can write a couple of files on my Ansible and boom, everything works... However I never had much luck setting Authelia up, Authentik on the other hand was very painless (albeit) manual (via UI) configuration. I don't do anything crazy, so any of them would work for me though, I just failed on setting Authelia and tried Authentik and had had no reason to change.
Authentik can be configured through terraform
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I'm currently using Authelia to authenticate for some of my self hosted services. It works fine, but the limited user backends (ldap or... yaml??) make me want to look for an alternative.
Authentik seems good, but after looking at their website I get the feeling of imminent enshitification, where they're going to either pull the rug on the open source version, or basically gatekeep essential features behind an enterprise license.
So, for those using Authentik, how has your experience been so far?
I do not consider Authelia secure from an architecture point of view.
That is because there is, by design, no authentication between authelia and the backend. That means that if anyone ever manages to directly access the backend services, they can impersonate anyone, including admin.
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I'm currently using Authelia to authenticate for some of my self hosted services. It works fine, but the limited user backends (ldap or... yaml??) make me want to look for an alternative.
Authentik seems good, but after looking at their website I get the feeling of imminent enshitification, where they're going to either pull the rug on the open source version, or basically gatekeep essential features behind an enterprise license.
So, for those using Authentik, how has your experience been so far?
How about zitadel as an option?
