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Cierge vs Spring Security: What are the differences?
What is Cierge? Easy magic-link authentication. Cierge is an open source authentication server (OIDC) that handles user signup, login, profiles, managerment, and more. Instead of storing passwords, Cirege uses magic links/codes and external logins to authenticate your users.
What is Spring Security? A powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. 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.
Cierge and Spring Security can be categorized as "User Management and Authentication" tools.
Some of the features offered by Cierge are:
- No passwords
- User management
- External logins
On the other hand, Spring Security provides the following key features:
- Comprehensive
- Servlet API integration
- Protection against attacks
Cierge and Spring Security are both open source tools. It seems that Spring Security with 3.63K GitHub stars and 3.2K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Cierge with 1.22K GitHub stars and 61 GitHub forks.
I am working on building a platform in my company that will provide a single sign on to all of the internal products to the customer. To do that we need to build an Authorisation server to comply with the OIDC protocol. Earlier we had built the Auth server using the Spring Security OAuth project but since in Spring Security 5.x it is no longer supported we are planning to get over with it as well. Below are the 2 options that I was considering to replace the Spring Auth Server. 1. Keycloak 2. Okta 3. Auth0 Please advise which one to use.
It isn't clear if beside the AuthZ requirement you had others, but given the scenario you described my suggestion would for you to go with Keycloak. First of all because you have already an onpremise IdP and with Keycloak you could maintain that setup (if privacy is a concern). Another important point is configuration and customization: I would assume with Spring OAuth you might have had some custom logic around authentication, this can be easily reconfigured in Keycloak by leveraging SPI (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_development/index.html#_auth_spi). Finally AuthZ as a functionality is well developed, based on standard protocols and extensible on Keycloak (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/authorization_services/)
We have good experience using Keycloak for SSO with OIDC with our Spring Boot based applications. It's free, easy to install and configure, extensible - so I recommend it.
You can also use Keycloak as an Identity Broker, which enables you to handle authentication on many different identity providers of your customers. With this setup, you are able to perform authorization tasks centralized.
Pros of Cierge
Pros of Spring Security
- Easy to use3
- Java integration3
