Why I choose ory for my auntentication layer

TL;DR

If you want to build on something you can truly trust because its core is open source fully there to see, read and change not just the SDK, and not just a small play project used by a few dozens or “authentication” being just one of its many other offerings but its sole reason for existence. Then ORY might be just for you.

Introduction

Firstly, I have to come clean, I am not sponsored by ORY nor know any one of them personally. I live in Wales, UK. They are based in München, Germany.

It took me a while to sit down and write this to share my experience with you on using ORY. I started using ORY for my side project which ultimately led me to use it to build as the core authentication layer for my startup.

Why did I choose ORY and not something like Azure B2C or Auth0?

Open Source and fully headless

I wanted something that I can trust and see for myself. Both azure b2c and auth0 along with many similar products only offer the SDK version while the meat and potato is hidden in the kitchen.

This means as a developer I cannot get a local azure b2c or auth0 working on my machine end to end. Hampering my learning and understanding of the system by relying on systems I cannot debug and examine at a closer look. This is especially important when I run into issues with the tool I am using, on one hand I have to raise a support ticket, on the other I can check locally what is wrong, pinpoint it and make a pull request fixing the issue or raise it with the community.

Open source for me therefore played a huge role in deciding my authentication layer. Along with being fully customizable. I can bring my own react front end and use ORY as a back end for my authentication and verification of new users. Open source does not mean that I am unhappy paying or using hosted services like azure b2c or auth0. In fact, ORY offers cloud versions of its projects (hosted by them), which I have used but its core functionality and running of its system is based on the open source implementation which I as a consumer can read and contribute to, this makes a world of difference.

Vendor lock

Ultimately, this also removes one of my core fears, vendor lock. I am not bound by a organisation policies and ultimately if push comes to shove I can run ORY in production myself in environments I can control autonomously.

Great community

What personally swayed me to going with ORY over other providers, is how ORY has been cultivating multiple other Authentication focused projects, kratos (for general purpose authentication) being one of them. The ORY team has built out multiple authentication projects that are highly rated within the software/security community. Which in turn has created in my opinion a great community that is very helpful and deeply knowledgeable about identity, something you cannot get unless you ask for support elsewhere and pay premium on top.

Not a small fish

It speaks highly of ORY that their software is being used by retail giant such as Sainsbury's yet still adopted by fundamental institutions such as Raspberry Pi Foundation. This wide adoption across a spectrum of sectors in itself is not shocking when considering how many requests they have secured so far.

815.9 billion requests

At the time of this writing 13/09/2022 (British date format). This number keeps going up by a million or so each passing day. Fully open source, affordable cloud version managed by ORY, environment you can setup-up on your own local machine (to replicate a real production run) and a friendly developer community.

Stranger to a raving fan

It only makes sense that I become a raving fan.

I encourage you to give ORY a shot, they have a free plan and a paid plan for production usage as cheap as $18 dollars. I feel like a salesman, but every now and then when something good comes along it is hard not to rave about it. I am using it personally myself, give it a try it is free you might just love it as much as I am.