What’s everyones recommendations for a self-hosted authentication system?
My requirements are basically something lightweight that can handle logins for both regular users and google. I only have 4-5 total users.
So far, I’ve looked at and tested:
- Authentik - Seems okay, but also really slow for some reason. I’m also not a fan of the username on one page, password on the next screen flow
- Keycloak - Looks like it might be lighter in resources these days, but definitely complicated to use
- LLDAP - I’d be happy to use it for the ldap backend, but it doesn’t solve the whole problem
- Authelia - No web ui, which is fine, but also doesn’t support social logins as far as I can tell. I think it would be my choice if it did support oidc
- Zitadel - Sounds promising, but I spent a couple hours troubleshooting it just to get it working. I might go back to it, but I’ve had the most trouble with it so far and can’t even compare the actual config yet
Do you have any issues with Authentik being slow? It might be my environment since I haven’t done much troubleshooting yet.
Do you mind elaborating a little on in what sense it is slow for you? It doesn’t “feel” slow for me, but as you’ve identified, it’s a multipage login process with some JavaScript driven content, so it’s not exactly the fastest compared to something more static. The pages generally loads in around/under 1 second for me; and once authenticated, the flow happens fairly quickly and infrequently that I don’t really notice or care for it.
Once I’m authenticated, it’s actually pretty okay. It goes through the redirections fast enough that I wouldn’t notice usually. But the login pages would take several seconds to load for me, and navigating around the admin ui also seemed to take several seconds for each page change. So not extremely slow, but slow enough to notice and get annoyed by it. Admittedly I probably could increase the session duration or something to help with that too.
Admin UI feels okay to me, at most 1/2 a second between page loads/repaints, definitely not several seconds kind of slow. I am running it on my oracle free tier VM and I’ve got only 3 users, so maybe I’m way over provisioned? Have you tried to measure where the latency is coming from? As in, it is the raw page load that’s slow, or if it is subsequent JavaScript triggered requests bottlenecking the performance?