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Stack Auth (YC S24) — Open-source Auth0/Clerk alternative
Stack Auth is managed user authentication & authorization. It is developer-friendly and fully open-source & self-hostable. Within 5 minutes, you can setup Stack and use its components such as <SignIn /> and <AccountSettings />.
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Konsti here, thanks for all the comments!
Lots of people are asking about our competitors, so here's how we're different. Think of a specific competitor and ask yourself:
- Are they open-source?
- Are they developer-friendly, even for startups and indie devs, letting you get started & scale in minutes?
- Besides authentication, do they also do authorization and user management, with features that you'll inevitably need (such as; multi-tenancy with teams/organizations, role-based access control, password authentication, user dashboard, analytics integration)?
How many YESes did you get? The answer is YES for Stack Auth on all three.
@kjosephabraham Thanks! We've both built startups before, and we found that one of the most painful aspects in the early stages was building things that weren't directly related to our core business. We spent a lot of time on tasks like authentication, user management, database migration, analytics, and billing. Our long-term vision is to solve all these problems with a five-minute setup and manage everything within one dashboard. We decided to tackle this from the most core and painful problem, which authentication!
@fomalhaut Wow, this looks super promising, will use it in my next project. Congratulations on the launch!
@fomalhaut
Hey Zai Shi, congrats on the launch! However, we also need a better version of auth for mobile development, especially for Expo projects
Congratulations on the launch. This looks clean.
Curious to know how different it is from next-auth.
also can we customize the sign in pages without using the stack components?
@madospace
Hi Madhu, thank you for your support!
Differences from Next-Auth: We just have more features — for example, we have built-in support for teams/organizations, RBAC, password auth, JWT metadata, and so on and so forth. We are a managed solution for authentication, authorization, and user management, whereas Next-Auth is simply a library for authentication only.
About customization: Yes, everything is fully customizable! You can build your own button and call a function like stackApp.signInWithOAuth("google") when clicking it.
Gotta upvote another open source project that makes it easy to build auth related functions for developers who honestly don't have much resources to deploy in this area but auth is so crucial to so many industries.
Congrats @fomalhaut and team on the team!
@virajpatel Hey Viraj! Architecturally, we are very similar to those solutions, so you still get the same control; we still have a managed service that will deal with all the trouble for you. The main difference is that we are open-source and self-hostable, so anyone can run and inspect the managed service by themselves.
Hey Zai & Konsti!
This is awesome! 🤩 ✨ Saved it for myself, definitely see it being a huge time-saver. I’ve battled with these things too many times, so I get how resource-heavy it can be. Love that it's open-source and self-hostable 💪
Great to see this, I had been very frustrated with the auth options recently, and it's exciting it's open source as well.
@zara_bottom Hey Zara, thanks! Indeed the components are quite customizable. They are shadcn/ui components by default but you can do a lot of things; you can check out the Customization section of our docs! https://docs.stack-auth.com
Regarding other products, it depends on the exact competitor you're talking about, but for each the reason is a combination of one of these three: We are open-source, we have features beyond authentication (eg. RBAC, organizations, user management), and we are very developer-friendly.
@skeptrune Can I ask what kind of issues you have with Keycloak? We are indeed a Keycloak alternative that is much more developer-friendly. We focus on both the frontend and backend, whereas Keycloak only focuses on the backend. The reason we didn't market ourselves that way is that most of our target users (Next.js developers) aren't familiar with Keycloak.
I've moved my webapp from Clerk to Stack Auth in hours. It's great to have an open-source alternative. The team has been very responsive and I'm happy to be an early adopter. Best of luck guys!
Hey @fomalhaut, this looks fantastic! 🎉 Solving the pain points around authentication and user management is crucial, especially for developers who want to focus on building their product rather than getting bogged down in the backend complexities.
I love that Stack Auth is fully open-source and self-hostable – that aligns perfectly with the growing trend of wanting more control over our tech stacks and avoiding vendor lock-in. The fact that you can get started in just five minutes is a huge bonus too! It definitely speaks to the kind of efficiency we all crave in our development workflows.
I’d love to see more about the integration flow and any unique features you’re rolling out. Have you thought about a community toolkit or examples to help new users get to grips with RBAC and user management? Looking forward to trying it out in my projects and joining the Discord as well!
@blankwebdev thanks!
About community toolkit: we do have future plans integrating Slack/Discord/Telegram auth so people can build community management tools more easily!
About examples: our GitHub has an "examples" folder, and there are also some community built projects in the readme
Thanks for you project!
We've built many web projects before, and the most annoying part of starting a project is the endless hours of struggling with authentication, user management, account settings, and RBAC. None of the existing open-source solutions have the developer-friendliness and feature set that we would like to see.
Good luck
Congratulations on the launch!🎉
Looks super promising, going to give it a try soon.
Congrats on the Launch 🎉
Looking forward to consider StackAuth in my next next.js project :-)
Hey Zai and Konsti,
How does your self-hosting option compare to managed hosting in terms of setup complexity and ongoing maintenance?
Do you have plans to support additional authentication methods beyond the standard ones?
Congrats on the launch!
@kyrylosilin Self-hosting definitely takes a bit more effort to setup than managed, but its dependencies are nicely dockerized which makes things much easier. If you wanna go this route, I'd recommend you to join our Discord — there are a number of people self-hosting there.
Which authentication methods do you have in mind? Generally we'll support anything if there's demand for it!
I am impressed with how quickly you can set this up. It’s great to see a tool that’s both powerful and user-friendly for developers.
@fomalhaut, Stack Auth is a breath of fresh air for developers! It’s so easy to set up and customize, plus being open-source and self-hostable is a huge win. Good Job team!
@tigerl Glad you think so! Feel free to reach out to us with any questions or feedback.
Stack Auth