Zitadel Has a Free Open-Source Identity Management Platform

Zitadel is a free, open-source identity management platform that handles authentication, authorization, and user management for your applications.

What Is Zitadel?

Zitadel is a modern alternative to Auth0 and Keycloak. It provides everything you need for user authentication — login, registration, SSO, MFA, RBAC — all in one platform.

Key features:

• Built-in login UI (no frontend coding needed)
• Multi-tenancy support
• OIDC, OAuth2, SAML support
• Passwordless authentication (FIDO2/WebAuthn)
• Multi-factor authentication
• Role-based access control (RBAC)
• Audit logging
• Self-hostable or cloud-hosted
• SDKs for every major framework

Why Not Just Use Auth0?

Auth0 is great — until you see the pricing:

• Auth0 free: 7,500 users, limited features
• Auth0 B2B: starts at $150/mo
• Auth0 Enterprise: $$$

Zitadel free tier: 50,000 monthly active users. Self-hosted: unlimited.

Quick Start

Cloud (free tier)

Sign up at zitadel.com, create an instance, get your credentials.

Self-host with Docker

docker run --name zitadel \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  ghcr.io/zitadel/zitadel:latest start-from-init \
  --masterkey "MasterkeyNeedsToHave32Characters" \
  --tlsMode disabled

Dashboard available at http://localhost:8080.

Add Login to Your App

React Example:

import { createBrowserRouter } from "react-router-dom";
import { ZitadelAuth } from "@zitadel/react";

const zitadel = new ZitadelAuth({
  authority: "https://your-instance.zitadel.cloud",
  client_id: "your-client-id",
});

// Login
await zitadel.authorize();

// Get user info
const user = await zitadel.userinfo();
console.log(user.name, user.email);

Node.js Backend:

import { createIntrospectionHandler } from "@zitadel/node";

// Validate JWT token
const handler = createIntrospectionHandler({
  authority: "https://your-instance.zitadel.cloud",
  authorization: {
    type: "client-credentials",
    clientId: "your-api-client-id",
    clientSecret: "your-secret"
  }
});

// Use as Express middleware
app.use("/api", handler, (req, res) => {
  res.json({ user: req.user });
});

Free Tier Comparison

Feature	Auth0 Free	Clerk Free	Zitadel Free
MAU	7,500	10,000	50,000
SSO	No	No	Yes
MFA	Limited	Yes	Yes
Custom domain	No	Paid	Yes
Branding	Limited	Yes	Yes
Self-host	No	No	Yes
Open source	No	No	Yes

Built-in Features

• Login/Registration UI: Customizable, multi-language, ready to use
• Password policies: Complexity rules, breach detection, history
• Branding: Custom logos, colors, fonts per tenant
• Email templates: Verification, password reset, welcome emails
• User management: Dashboard to manage users, roles, permissions
• Machine users: API keys for service-to-service auth
• Actions: Custom logic on login, registration, token creation

Multi-Tenancy

Perfect for B2B SaaS — each customer gets their own:

• Organization with custom branding
• User pool
• Login settings
• SSO configuration
• Role definitions

Who Uses Zitadel?

With 9K+ GitHub stars:

• SaaS companies needing multi-tenant auth
• Startups replacing expensive Auth0 plans
• Enterprises requiring self-hosted identity
• Developers wanting passwordless auth

Get Started

1. Create free cloud account or self-host
2. Create a project and application
3. Add SDK to your app
4. Users can log in immediately

50,000 free MAU. No credit card. Full feature set.

---

Building apps that need external data? Check out my web scraping tools on Apify — get structured data from any website. Need a custom scraper? Email [e-mail]