https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/04/11/keycloak-joins-cncf-as-a...
(some of those features are enterprise only)
The self-hosted space is another headache. I wasted so much time trying to make smaller self-hosted auth solutions work, since Keycloak has a reputation for being heavyweight.
I looked into the Ory stack extensively trying to actually use it as advertised for self-hosted / open-source auth. It's aggressively gimped and its SSO features are emphatically _not_ open-source and are gated behind licensing, with no way to find out until you're actually running it.
It's also just unfinished. Their "stack" is a lot of cobbled-together Go mixed with incompletely rebranded acquisitions like SAML Jackson (now "Polis"), which they managed to gut so completely it went from a best-in-class OSS library to unusable.
Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders".
For Ory, B2B login is a good value differentiator, because it's required by companies selling to other companies meaning they can spend some money on licenses to further develop software.
Ory powers the largest technology providers, and super small solo projects. It's robust, stable, Apache2 licensed. It's the best CIAM tech out there that's free (!!).
In the end, everyone is entitled to their opinion but the "open source can't make money" train is honestly a bottom tier opinion and I'm tired of reading it on HN, probably written by people making $100K+ a year for writing software and using open source daily (without paying a dime).
It's like the people complaining that Wikipedia is collecting too many donations, while they cheer on Apple or Anthropic or whoever raking in billions of dollars.
Somehow, only if it's open source / non profit it's bad to make money. If it's proprietary nobody gives a damn. Says a lot about society.
There is software that is cutting edge and always changing, and those types of products need to be paid for much more than software that is stable.
With a stable product like Auth (which requires only security fixes and minor features), the 'pay per MAU' model employed across Auth companies is unreasonable
A combination of the people and companies using the product for free or selling its support (like RedHat and IBM for KeyCloak) along with an open license allowing it to be offered as a cloud service should be sufficient?
If you want to pay per monthly active user for the rest of your life, up to you.
Vercel have raised multiple rounds, last one was in 2025 and $300m. So we don't know what the VC's are going to demand for revenue targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercel
It also really shows its age, imo. The interface is clunky, roles and groups having overlapping responsibilities is confusing, making custom UIs for it makes me feel ancient, etc.
I really can't complain though. There is simply no alternative that's as open atm. It's also not easy to make one ( I tried :( ).
It's Apache 2.0 and a CNCF incubating project.
the team at Vercel has been my biggest inspiration and always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth. This would allow us to focus more on what made better-auth great in the first place It hasn't even been 2 years since we started but thank you everyone from the open-source community for helping us make an impact in short amount of time. There is a lot to do to improve on open source auth and im really excited to be back focusing full time on building
https://ben3d.ca/blog/passwordless-login-system
If you are building a user system with a database already, adding passwordless auth is easy.
Best of luck over there!
i really loved better-auth’s DX but the nature of their database adapters means it’s relatively easy to switch over to another provider/library
Better Auth is the go-to solution for many people using Nextjs, so it makes sense that Vercel puts some effort in maintaining it.
I have never had issues running Nextjs in regular containers, it is just a good open source solution, I don't see why it would be any different with Better Auth.
Anything that makes it easier for developers to build secure applications is a win!