We have a special focus on B2B features that make it easy for an end user to sign up, create and manage their own organization in your product, invite their co-workers, and so on. This includes roles within the organization (RBAC). We provide frontend and backend libraries where organizations are a first class concept, and we host UIs on your domain to manage the rest.
We didn't start out with this focus. PropelAuth actually started out of a chess side project I was working on. As side projects go, I started by focusing on the core product and fun aspects of it. Things like user authentication felt like a distraction from the things I wanted to work on.
I’ve set up auth at different jobs and for friends' companies in the past, and I never felt like any tool nailed it. The experience I wanted was “all aspects of auth are taken care of for me, UIs included” and then to have minimal libraries to check if users were logged in or not. The MVP of PropelAuth was a set of basic UIs that we hosted on our customers domain, some admin tools, and a few frontend/backend libraries.
We were also dogfooding ourselves—and because we sell to businesses, we built out some B2B specific features: creating organizations, inviting coworkers, roles/RBAC, and the UIs for all that. When talking with early customers, those turned out to be the features that got the strongest reactions. B2B founders were looking for that, and existing auth tools didn’t have these features or didn’t have them in an easy to implement way. So that’s been our focus ever since.
The product today acts similarly to a self-contained auth microservice that you can configure. It has simple UIs like signup and login and then more advanced ones like security pages (with 2fa enrollment) and organization management (with roles support).
The frontend libraries request short lived tokens for your users that your backends can verify. It also exposes APIs to fetch user and organization information.
We have a free plan, and charge $0.02 per monthly active user for the next plan up.
We’d love to hear any feedback you have! If you want to try out the product, you can sign up on our website at https://www.propelauth.com. You can check out our docs at https://docs.propelauth.com/ and there are guides at https://www.propelauth.com/blog-categories/guide. Thanks!
0: https://www.ory.sh/kratos/
1: https://github.com/ory/kratos
2: https://www.ory.sh/docs/kratos/guides/zero-trust-iap-proxy-i...
3: https://github.com/ory/oathkeeper
For comparing to something like Kratos, probably the best way of putting it is, the first line of the quickstart guide for Kratos is "Ory Kratos has several moving parts and getting everything right from the beginning can be challenging" - and we want to provide the opposite initial experience. We want there to be an understandable UI for login + team management that you can interact with immediately and quickly configure. Kratos and Oathkeeper are really cool though, especially when you want to go significantly deeper in tuning things. As we add on more complexity, we want to make sure that that initial experience is still really walk up usable.
That's them overstating it. You could deploy it in couple of hours (in its simplest form).
1. SAML?
2. SCIM?
3. In your domain model, do users belong-to organizations? Or is it a has-and-belongs-to-many sort of deal? Can I configure that?
There's a one to many mapping from users to organizations. We can also support users that don't have organizations. What types of configurations would you want?
This type of thing could be really useful but I wonder how hard it will be to generalize the problem.
I personally think that the ability to opt into more complexity is really interesting. Starting with a basic set of roles within a single organization is appealing when you are small, and then importantly having the ability to layer in groups or layer in scopes/actions associated with those roles.
I love the concept of the product. We're essentially focused on building an internal version this project, so if we could scale up with you and offboard (if need be) at a later date, that would be awesome.
We're also seriously considering ORY Kratos.
I wrote about the differences between us and ORY Kratos here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702430 Happy to chat anytime, if you want, my email is in my bio.
You can tell Andrew uses it himself from the practical docs and providing nice things like express middleware. I imagine it must be a bit mind bending to dogfood the service.
The plus side is everything we build for ourselves we can release to customers.
Seems like I might not have to :)
It's always fun to hear the workarounds people do to avoid adding orgs/teams - my personal favorite is the single account everyone share a password case :)
Happy to chat anytime - my emails in my profile!
My main gripe with Auth0 was that they lacked support for organizations, until they added support for that a year ago. With that in place now, I don't see any USP that would make me use your product.
Anecdotally, pretty much every startup we talked to that tried to use Auth0's organizations either stopped pretty quickly or ripped it out due to API slowness.
If you've used their org support, I'd love to chat to hear more