Compare FreeIPA to these popular alternatives based on real-world usage and developer feedback.

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.

Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software.

The CentOS Project is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem. For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon, along with extensive resources to build, test, release, and maintain their code.

A clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

It is the operating system that presently powers many of the mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is designed to make your iPhone and iPad experience even faster, more responsive, and more delightful.

It is a mobile platform which powers phones, tablets, watches, TVs, cars etc. It makes doing business easier, in the office or out in the field. Manage entire fleets of devices with a touch. Keep corporate data protected with built-in security. And help your employees get more done.
JSON Web Token is an open standard that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed.

A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enables Single Sign On and user management to all your applications.

A series of personal computer operating systems produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows NT family of operating systems.

Desktop, laptop and home computers, and by web usage, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows.

It is an Open Source Identity and Access Management For Modern Applications and Services. It adds authentication to applications and secure services with minimum fuss. No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users. It's all available out of the box.
It is a comprehensive identity and access management solution that gives you a robust set of capabilities to manage users and groups. You can get the reliability and scalability you need with identity services that work with your on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environment.

It is an authorization framework that enables a third-party application to obtain limited access to an HTTP service, either on behalf of a resource owner by orchestrating an approval interaction between the resource owner and the HTTP service, or by allowing the third-party application to obtain access on its own behalf.

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system.

You can create unique identities for your users through a number of public login providers (Amazon, Facebook, and Google) and also support unauthenticated guests. You can save app data locally on users’ devices allowing your applications to work even when the devices are offline.

A lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

It is a framework that focuses on providing both authentication and authorization to Java applications. The real power of Spring Security is found in how easily it can be extended to meet custom requirements.

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden

It provides backend services, easy-to-use SDKs, and ready-made UI libraries to authenticate users to your app. It supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Google,

It is a brand name for a group of server operating systems released by Microsoft. It includes all Windows operating systems, Increase security, evolve your data center, and innovate faster with Microsoft Windows Server, the cloud-ready operating system.
It is authentication middleware for Node.js. Extremely flexible and modular, It can be unobtrusively dropped in to any Express-based web application. A comprehensive set of strategies support authentication using a username and password, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

It is the latest iteration of the Microsoft operating systems and has been optimized for home PC performance in a wide variety of applications from serious work to after-hours gaming.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the industry-leading Linux that provides the foundation for next-generation architectures, with support for all major hardware platforms and thousands of commercial and custom applications.

OmniAuth is a Ruby authentication framework aimed to abstract away the difficulties of working with various types of authentication providers. It is meant to be hooked up to just about any system, from social networks to enterprise systems to simple username and password authentication.

The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

It brings new features inspired by its most powerful users, but designed for everyone. Stay better focused on your work in Dark Mode. Automatically organize files using Stacks.

It is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. It contains several hundred tools which are geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering.

An operating system for a variety of platforms which focuses on features, speed, and stability. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large community.
It is a simple identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. It allows Clients to verify the identity of the End-User based on the authentication performed by an Authorization Server, as well as to obtain basic profile information about the End-User in an interoperable and REST-like manner.

It is designed for security, consistency, and reliability. Instead of installing packages via yum or apt, it uses Linux containers to manage your services at a higher level of abstraction. A single service's code and all dependencies are packaged within a container that can be run on one or many machines.

It is an accessible, friendly, open-source Linux distribution and community. Based on Arch Linux, it provides all the benefits of cutting-edge software combined with a focus on getting started quickly, automated tools to require less manual intervention, and help readily available when needed.

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

It is optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. It provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 35,000 packages, pre-compiled software bundled in a nice format for easy installation on your Raspberry Pi.

lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment -- including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dualboot setup.

It is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, it is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages.

The openSUSE project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. openSUSE creates one of the world's best Linux distributions, working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community.

The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more informati...

It makes it simple to run containers at scale in development, test and production. By containerizing system services and leveraging Docker for management, the operating system provides a very reliable and easy to manage containers.

It is a free, open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Lightweight Directory Access is an application protocol that is used to crosscheck information on the server end.

It is a mature, flexible, and well supported standards-based mechanism for interacting with directory servers. It’s often used for authentication and storing information about users, groups, and applications, but an LDAP directory server is a fairly general-purpose data store and can be used in a wide variety of applications.

Clerk gives you more than just a "sign-in box". You get a complete set of User Management UIs and APIs, including a powerful Admin Dashboard. Purpose-built for React, Next.js, and the Modern Web. Finally, an auth service that "just works".


It is a free operating system based on either Linux or FreeBSD that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need.

This package provides JSON Web Token Authentication support for Django REST framework. Unlike some more typical uses of JWTs, this module only generates authentication tokens that will verify the user who is requesting one of your DRF protected API resources.

It is the flagship distribution to showcase the Pantheon desktop environment. The distribution promotes itself as a “fast, open, and privacy-respecting” replacement to macOS and Windows.

It is a free and secure UNIX-like operating system that emphasizes portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security & integrated cryptography.

Passwords are the bane of app security. With a few lines of code and no bloat, it lets you build apps with blazing-fast, customizable, passwordless login - with future-proof crypto and identity tech under the hood.

It is a free, complete, and open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X which contains everything you need to work, play, or share. It unites Ubuntu with KDE and the fabulous Plasma desktop, bringing you a full set of applications. The installation includes productivity, office, email, graphics, photography, and music applications ready to use at startup.

Stormpath is an authentication and user management service that helps development teams quickly and securely build web and mobile applications and services.