Auth apps

I use kanidm because the footprint is lower than the alternatives you mention, and it’s written in Rust.

I use Authentik - works well - but I’m prepping to switch to Authelia for the config-based setup.

I updated Authentik across 2 versions (they did 2 month-long supported tags, missed one; now they do 3 month-long supported tags) and it destroyed itself. Had to recover the DB from a backup (and then step through the version I tried to skip), and while I was doing that I was like “wait why does this have only a DB? Should just be a config file cause that’s all the depth I do with it” and lo that’s what Authelia is.

Authentik is audited and Authelia has not been. Initially while I chose Authentik. But config-file robustness in the face of Authentik’s GUI-setup DB imploding swayed me not to care, it’d take so long and be so tedious to redo all my proxies and auths through the GUI. Plus I always forget what to click in the GUI when I come back to add some new program in 4 months.

I love authentik

Now it needs no middleware. Just authentik and postgres

The ui is great, features are great, great api. Super easy to self host and manage

Open source, small dedicated team. Can’t ask for more

Authentik is great, super versatile, if not a bit of effort to get it set up initially

I personally run authelia. I prefer the config file over a gui where i have to click everything together. For the actual user storage i got lldap.

But my requirements a possibly different to yours, my main focus was no docker and no javascript backend.

Keycloak is definetly overkill for a homelab. Both in effort to get it to run, and maintaining it.

I ended up at PocketID. Authentik (and I think authelia too) is good but way more complicated than what I needed for a homelab. A lot of people like VoidAuth, but i didn’t care for the visual style. Don’t think I ever tried keycloak.

Developer of VoidAuth here; if you decide to give it a try let me know if you run into any issues during setup, or have any feedback!

I use authentik. It’s probably fairly easy to set up if you use their docker-compose, but I run it as rootless podman, which took a little work to get it converted to a quadlet pod. But now that it’s set up, it works great and handles a variety of self-hosted apps that use saml, oidc, ldap, and forward-auth. It’s one of the few options that handles all the different authentication types natively. I also set up passkeys and standard two-factor time codes.

There are some very helpful authentik youtube tutorials by Cooptonian.

Kanidm

It has a modest UI for end-users to handle self-service scenarios, and an app portal for OpenID Connect configured applications.

The backend is fully CLI based.

It is very robust and performant, built on Rust.

Yet very much in active development, so do not expect full parity with commercial alternatives at a feature level.

I run it to provision users for my home Linux devices and it supports offline login, my Homelab servers, and my self-hosted web applications through OIDC.

A nice ‘one stop shop’ for my purposes.

EDIT: Actually their comparison page might be a worthwhile read considering your question OP.

The best is pretty subjective and partially relies on what you need.

Keycloak is one of the most feature complete ones I think.

I’ve used authelia before and liked it, but it had a very bare UI and everything was done through config files which forced redeploys on changes. It wasn’t ideal for me.

I’m currently trying out voidauth. It’s got some more Ui features compared to authelia and can apparently also simulate some Active Directory queries to forward your users to third party tools for provisioning ( unless I saw that wrong, I haven’t tested any yet ).

Authentik looked nice, but I haven’t gotten around to checking that one out yet.

Its really stange seeing kanidm basically never mentioned in these types of threads dispite how perfect it is for selfhosting: great documentation, incredibly easy to get setup, easy to make a custom themed/setup auth page, lets users name themselves how they prefer instead of requiring “firstname lastname” (why does every service need a lastname when it never gets used?)

Authelia and authentik are cool but are way more complex then you need for authenticating a couple services and for me at least feel “bloated” for my usecase

There is no “overall best”, just one that works best for you. I like to keep mine on a managed encrypted server so I use Ente Auth. I think Proton has one as well.

“The best” depends on what you really need.

Authentik and Authelia are two of the top most quoted solutions, but they aim to be an “everything in one” package, with tons of features a simple homelab will rarely need. They’re aimed more at enterprise-like setups.

On the other end of the spectrum you have e.g. Pocket-ID, which only does OIDC by itself (you can hook up an LDAP server as user database though); but that tradeoff means it uses little to no CPU time, and, in my experience, around 130MB RAM. Given RAM is getting more expensive than gold, one needs to consider memory footprint, especially for older homelab setups. We can’t all be running 256GB nodes after all.

So instead of hunting the mythical “best” solution, decide what features you really need, grab a list of providers that cover those features, and compare them to see what fits your needs best.

Aegis