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Spring Security vs Django REST framework JWT: What are the differences?
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.
What is Django REST framework JWT? JSON Web Token Authentication support for Django REST Framework. 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.
Spring Security and Django REST framework JWT can be primarily classified as "User Management and Authentication" tools.
Some of the features offered by Spring Security are:
- Comprehensive
- Servlet API integration
- Protection against attacks
On the other hand, Django REST framework JWT provides the following key features:
- JSON Web Token Authentication
- Django REST framework
- Generates authentication tokens
Spring Security and Django REST framework JWT are both open source tools. It seems that Spring Security with 3.8K GitHub stars and 3.3K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Django REST framework JWT with 2.71K GitHub stars and 479 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.
KeycloakIt 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/)
KeycloakWe 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.
Pros of Django REST framework JWT
- Stateless2
Pros of Spring Security
- Java integration3
- Easy to use2
