OAuth2 vs Passport

Overview

Passport

Stacks471

Followers368

Votes0

GitHub Stars23.5K

Forks1.2K

OAuth2

Stacks683

Followers650

Votes0

OAuth2 vs Passport: What are the differences?

1. **OAuth2**: OAuth2 is an authorization framework that allows third-party applications to access user resources without disclosing their credentials. It involves the concept of access and refresh tokens for authentication and authorization. 2. **Passport**: Passport is a middleware for Node.js that provides a simple and flexible authentication framework. It supports various authentication strategies such as local, OAuth, OpenID, etc., and can be easily integrated into any Express-based web application.

User Management: OAuth2 focuses on managing user authorization and access to resources by implementing roles and permissions. On the other hand, Passport primarily deals with user authentication, providing a way to verify user identities using various authentication strategies.
Scope of Use: While Passport is mainly used for single-page applications or traditional server-rendered web applications, OAuth2 is designed for wider use cases, including mobile apps, APIs, and IoT devices.
Third-party Authentication: Passport allows developers to integrate various third-party login providers (such as Google, Facebook, etc.) into their applications using different authentication strategies. OAuth2, however, is a protocol that allows third-party applications to access the user's resources using an access token.
Token-Based Authentication: OAuth2 uses access tokens for authentication and authorization purposes, which are issued by the authorization server and used to access protected resources. Passport, on the other hand, does not enforce the use of access tokens and relies on session-based authentication by default.
Security Features: OAuth2 provides additional security features such as token expiration, token revocation, and refresh tokens. These features ensure that access to resources is secure and can be controlled by the user. Passport, being a middleware, does not provide built-in security features like token management.
Ease of Use: Passport is known for its simplicity and flexibility, making it easy to integrate with different strategies and authentication providers. OAuth2, on the other hand, has a more complex protocol flow and requires setting up an authorization server, making it slightly more challenging to implement.

In summary, OAuth2 is an authorization framework with a wide scope of use, focusing on user access control and providing security features like token-based authentication, while Passport is a middleware for authentication, mainly used in web applications, offering flexibility and simplicity in integrating different authentication strategies.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on Passport, OAuth2

Vaibhav

Jul 17, 2020

Needs advice

Currently, Passport.js repo has 324 open issues, and Jared (the original author) seems to be the one doing most of the work. Also, given that the documentation is not proper. Is it worth using Passport.js?

As of now, StackShare shows it has 29 companies using it. How do you implement auth in your project or your company? Are there any good alternatives to Passport.js? Should I implement auth from scratch?

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Passport	OAuth2
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 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.
Single sign-on with OpenID and OAuth; Easily handle success and failure	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 23.5K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.2K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 471	Stacks 683
Followers 368	Followers 650
Votes 0	Votes 0
Integrations
ExpressJS Vue.js JSON Web Token	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Passport, OAuth2?

Auth0

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

Stormpath

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

Keycloak

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.

Devise

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden

Firebase Authentication

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,

Amazon Cognito

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.

WorkOS

Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code.

OAuth.io

OAuth is a protocol that aimed to provide a single secure recipe to manage authorizations. It is now used by almost every web application. However, 30+ different implementations coexist. OAuth.io fixes this massive problem by acting as a universal adapter, thanks to a robust API. With OAuth.io integrating OAuth takes minutes instead of hours or days.

OmniAuth

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.

ORY Hydra

It is a self-managed server that secures access to your applications and APIs with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect. It is OpenID Connect Certified and optimized for latency, high throughput, and low resource consumption.

Related Comparisons

OAuth2 vs Passport: What are the differences?

User Management: OAuth2 focuses on managing user authorization and access to resources by implementing roles and permissions. On the other hand, Passport primarily deals with user authentication, providing a way to verify user identities using various authentication strategies.
Scope of Use: While Passport is mainly used for single-page applications or traditional server-rendered web applications, OAuth2 is designed for wider use cases, including mobile apps, APIs, and IoT devices.
Third-party Authentication: Passport allows developers to integrate various third-party login providers (such as Google, Facebook, etc.) into their applications using different authentication strategies. OAuth2, however, is a protocol that allows third-party applications to access the user's resources using an access token.
Token-Based Authentication: OAuth2 uses access tokens for authentication and authorization purposes, which are issued by the authorization server and used to access protected resources. Passport, on the other hand, does not enforce the use of access tokens and relies on session-based authentication by default.
Security Features: OAuth2 provides additional security features such as token expiration, token revocation, and refresh tokens. These features ensure that access to resources is secure and can be controlled by the user. Passport, being a middleware, does not provide built-in security features like token management.
Ease of Use: Passport is known for its simplicity and flexibility, making it easy to integrate with different strategies and authentication providers. OAuth2, on the other hand, has a more complex protocol flow and requires setting up an authorization server, making it slightly more challenging to implement.

OAuth2 vs Passport

Overview