Authentik vs Logto: Open Source Auth Compared 2026
Authentik vs Logto: Open Source Auth Compared
Both are modern alternatives to Keycloak — but they solve different problems. Authentik excels at securing existing applications with proxy authentication. Logto excels at adding auth to new applications with beautiful SDKs. Here's the breakdown.
Quick Verdict
Choose Authentik for securing existing and legacy applications, proxy-based authentication, and enterprise features with modern UX. Choose Logto for the fastest developer experience building new apps with auth — pre-built UI, framework SDKs, and Auth0-like simplicity.
The Comparison
| Feature | Authentik | Logto |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Python (Django) + Go | TypeScript/Node.js |
| OIDC/OAuth 2.0 | ✅ | ✅ |
| SAML 2.0 | ✅ | ✅ (basic) |
| LDAP | ✅ (outpost) | ❌ |
| Proxy auth | ✅ (killer feature) | ❌ |
| Social login | ✅ | ✅ (30+ connectors) |
| MFA/2FA | ✅ | ✅ |
| Passkeys | ✅ | ✅ |
| Pre-built sign-in UI | ✅ | ✅ (more polished) |
| Framework SDKs | Limited | ✅ (15+ frameworks) |
| Management console | ✅ (beautiful) | ✅ (modern) |
| Flow builder | ✅ Visual flows | Basic |
| Organizations | Tenants | ✅ Orgs |
| Machine-to-machine | ✅ | ✅ |
| Blueprints/IaC | ✅ (YAML blueprints) | ❌ |
| SCIM | ✅ | ❌ |
| Audit logs | ✅ (detailed) | ✅ |
| Webhooks | ❌ (events via API) | ✅ |
| Custom JWT | ✅ | ✅ |
| RAM usage | 1–2 GB | 512 MB–1 GB |
| Stars | 14K+ | 9K+ |
| License | MIT (source-available) | MPL-2.0 |
When to Choose Authentik
- Securing existing applications without code changes (proxy auth)
- You need LDAP (Authentik can act as an LDAP server)
- Enterprise features like SAML, SCIM provisioning
- Visual flow builder for complex auth flows
- Infrastructure-as-code auth configuration (YAML blueprints)
- Legacy app authentication without modifying the app
- Admin console UX is a priority
When to Choose Logto
- Building new applications from scratch
- Framework SDKs (Next.js, React, Vue, Express, Go) are important
- Pre-built sign-in experience out of the box
- SaaS multi-tenancy with Organizations
- Webhooks for event-driven integrations
- Lightest possible resource footprint
- Auth0-like developer experience
- Coming from Auth0 and need migration path
The Key Difference: Proxy Auth vs SDK Auth
Authentik's superpower is the outpost proxy. Put it in front of any web application — even one with no authentication built in — and Authentik handles login, session management, and access control. No code changes to the target app.
Logto's superpower is the SDK experience. Install an npm package, configure three environment variables, and you have complete auth with beautiful sign-in pages, social login, and user management.
Different tools for different jobs.
The Bottom Line
Authentik is for teams managing a portfolio of applications — some new, some legacy, some without built-in auth. The proxy model and visual flow builder make it uniquely powerful for infrastructure teams.
Logto is for developers building new products who want the fastest path to production auth. The SDK experience, pre-built UI, and Auth0-like management console make it the developer's choice.
If you're securing existing infrastructure, choose Authentik. If you're building new products, choose Logto.
Self-Hosting Requirements and Infrastructure Sizing
The infrastructure requirements for Authentik and Logto differ meaningfully, and choosing the wrong size for your deployment creates either wasted spend or performance problems under load.
Authentik is a Python/Django + Go application with a multi-container architecture. A minimal production deployment needs the main Authentik server container, an Authentik worker container, PostgreSQL, and Redis. The recommended minimum RAM for the server and worker combined is around 1-2 GB, plus PostgreSQL and Redis overhead — plan for 3 GB total on the host. A Hetzner CX32 at $14 per month is a comfortable starting point. Authentik's worker handles background tasks: email sending, LDAP sync, event log processing. Under heavy LDAP federation load — synchronizing thousands of users from Active Directory — the worker process can spike in CPU usage, so monitor accordingly and scale the host if needed.
Authentik's outpost architecture is worth understanding for proxy deployments. An outpost is a separate, lightweight proxy agent that you deploy alongside applications you want to protect. The outpost communicates with the Authentik server but handles authentication decisions locally, meaning the proxy latency overhead is minimal. You can run multiple outposts: one per network segment, one per service cluster, or even one co-located with each application. This architecture scales well for organizations protecting many applications without putting all authentication traffic through a single bottleneck.
Logto, as a TypeScript/Node.js monolith with PostgreSQL, is simpler to operate. The single-process architecture means fewer containers to monitor and fewer failure modes to reason about. A Hetzner CX21 (2 GB RAM, $6/month) runs Logto comfortably for small to medium deployments. For higher concurrency — thousands of simultaneous token validations during peak traffic — the Node.js process benefits from additional RAM and a faster CPU, but the scaling story is simpler than Authentik's multi-component setup.
Both tools work naturally behind a Caddy or Nginx reverse proxy with Let's Encrypt TLS. Authentik's admin UI and Logto's management console should be restricted to internal network access or behind a VPN — neither is designed to have its admin interface exposed to the public internet without additional access controls. The advanced Vaultwarden setup guide covers general principles for hardening admin interfaces that apply equally well to identity platform management consoles.
Security Depth: YAML Blueprints, Flow Builder, and Compliance
Authentik's YAML blueprints are a genuinely unique feature in the open source identity space. Blueprints are declarative configuration files that define authentication flows, policies, property mappings, and provider configurations. By storing your Authentik configuration as code, you can version it in Git, apply it via CI/CD, and ensure consistent configuration across development, staging, and production environments. This is the kind of infrastructure-as-code practice that security-conscious organizations apply to all their systems but rarely achieve for their identity platform.
The visual flow builder complements the blueprints by making complex authentication logic visual and auditable. A flow in Authentik is a sequence of stages — user identification, password validation, MFA challenge, consent — connected by policies that determine branching logic. You can build flows like: if the user is in the "contractors" group, require a hardware key; if they are in the "employees" group, accept TOTP. These conditional access policies, implemented visually, give Authentik capabilities that often require expensive commercial IAM products in enterprise environments.
Authentik's SCIM support enables automatic user provisioning and de-provisioning. When a user is added to your identity provider, SCIM automatically creates their account in connected applications. When they leave, SCIM removes access. For organizations with compliance requirements around access management — SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 — automated provisioning is a significant advantage over manual account management.
For compliance-focused organizations, both tools offer audit logs. Authentik's event logs capture login attempts, access grants, policy evaluations, and administrative actions with timestamps and IP addresses. Logto's audit logging is similarly comprehensive. Both are GDPR-compatible when run on self-hosted infrastructure with EU-based data residency. The EU digital sovereignty regulations driving open source adoption article covers why organizations in regulated industries increasingly prefer self-hosted identity tools over Auth0 and Okta.
Cost Comparison and Migration from Auth0
For teams currently paying Auth0 pricing, the financial case for migrating to either Authentik or Logto is compelling. Auth0's pricing model charges per monthly active user above the free tier threshold. At the B2C+ plan level for applications with significant user growth, Auth0 bills can easily reach $1,000 to $3,000 per month. Enterprise features like custom domains on all environments, advanced MFA, and SAML SSO require higher tiers with custom pricing.
Self-hosting Authentik on a $14 Hetzner server covers unlimited users, unlimited applications, full SAML support, LDAP, proxy authentication, and all the enterprise features — for $168 per year. Self-hosting Logto on a $6 server covers unlimited users, unlimited applications, multi-tenancy with Organizations, 30+ social connectors, and the full SDK suite — for $72 per year. The per-user cost at any non-trivial scale is effectively zero, which means growth in your user base never triggers a billing conversation.
The migration path from Auth0 to Logto is the cleaner of the two options for SaaS applications. Auth0's SDK patterns (using JWTs, OIDC endpoints, management API patterns) align closely with Logto's design. The main migration work is exporting users from Auth0 with hashed passwords and importing them to Logto. For users with Auth0-specific password hashes, a seamless migration requires running both Auth0 and Logto briefly while users re-authenticate through Logto — at which point their credentials are re-hashed in Logto's format. This period typically runs one to three months for most applications.
Migrating from Auth0 to Authentik makes more sense for organizations that also need proxy authentication for legacy applications. If you have an internal tool that predates your Auth0 adoption and relies on session-based auth without API token support, Authentik's outpost proxy can add modern SSO to it without touching the application's code. This combination — Authentik protecting legacy apps via proxy and handling modern app auth via OIDC simultaneously — is a migration path that Auth0 and Okta cannot replicate because they lack the proxy capability entirely. See the Keycloak vs Authentik comparison for a deeper look at how Authentik compares to the other enterprise-grade option when the proxy use case is a priority.
Integrating with the Self-Hosted Stack
Both tools integrate naturally as the central authentication hub for a broader self-hosted application stack. The pattern is straightforward: configure each self-hosted service to use OIDC with Authentik or Logto as the provider, then centralize user management, provisioning, and de-provisioning in the identity platform.
Authentik connects to self-hosted services like Grafana, Mattermost, Nextcloud, Gitea, and dozens of others through pre-built integrations available in the Authentik documentation. The property mapping system lets you pass custom claims to each application — group membership, department, manager — that applications can use for their own role assignments. Grafana, for example, can read a group claim from the OIDC token and automatically assign users to Grafana organizations based on their department in Authentik.
Logto's webhook system enables event-driven integrations with the rest of your stack. When a user registers, signs in, or is deleted, Logto can fire webhooks to trigger downstream processes: create accounts in other services, add contacts to your CRM, enroll the user in an onboarding email sequence in Listmonk. For teams building multi-service applications, Logto's organization management feature maps user tenants to application workspaces automatically through the Organizations API, eliminating custom middleware that most SaaS applications otherwise need to build.
For teams running a complete self-hosted ecosystem — communication on Mattermost, project management on Plane, documentation on Outline or BookStack, analytics on Plausible, scheduling on Cal.com — centralizing authentication on Authentik or Logto means a single sign-on experience across all tools, single-point user provisioning and de-provisioning, and unified audit logging for all access events. This level of identity governance is typically associated with expensive enterprise IAM products. Self-hosting Authentik or Logto delivers it for under $200 per year in infrastructure costs.
Compare identity platforms on OSSAlt — features, deployment options, and community health side by side.
See open source alternatives to Authentik on OSSAlt.