Stack Auth is a managed user authentication solution. It is developer-friendly and fully open-source & self-hostable. Stack gets you started in just five minutes, after which you'll be ready to use all of its features as you grow your project.
Hi Product Hunt, Zai & Konsti here!
We built many web projects before, and the most annoying part of starting a project is spending countless hours battling with authentication, user management, account settings, and RBAC. None of the open-source solutions have the developer-friendliness and the feature set we'd wish for. We want to solve this problem for everyone with a great all-in-one open-source and self-hostable platform.
We have paid managed hosting available on our platform, which will give you the same experience as Clerk or other services. However, we build trust with our customers and avoid vendor lock-in by keeping all infrastructure 100% open-source.
If you like what we're building, please try it out in your project! Also, join our Discord to build great things together!
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.
Report
@fomalhaut Well done on the launch! Wishing you continued success and growth. How did you come up with the idea?
@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!
Report
@fomalhaut Wow, this looks super promising, will use it in my next project. Congratulations on the launch!
Report
@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.
Report
Hey, Congratulations on your launch!
This is an awesome idea but are the components customizable and how's this different from the other products that are already in the market?
@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.
Hi Stack Auth team! Congrats on the launch. How does Stack Auth’s open-source approach provide flexibility and control compared to proprietary solutions like Auth0 and Firebase Auth?
@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.
I'm curious why you guys decided to go in more of the Auth0/Clerk direction than the Keycloak one?
It seems that there are a bunch of open source alts to Auth0/Clerk, but not really Keycloak and Keycloak is where I have all the pain.
@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.
Report
I've used Auth0 and Supabase Auth. I just tried Stack Auth, and it’s very simple and intuitive. I've decided to use it in my next project.
What's even more impressive is that it's open source!
Congrats on the launch, great job!!!!!!
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 💪
Stack Auth
Stack Auth
Stack Auth
Maxim AI
Stack Auth
Stack Auth
Lancey
Stack Auth
Trieve
Stack Auth
Stack Auth
Pathway