head to head · open source
casbin vs tinyauth
casbin has 20,478 GitHub stars, 1,767 forks, 38 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. tinyauth has 8,478 stars, 289 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped today. casbin leads on adoption by 142% (20,478 vs 8,478 stars). casbin is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tinyauth is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. casbin has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, tinyauth 3%. tinyauth was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (authentication), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| casbin | tinyauth | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 20K | ★ 8.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 289 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick casbin if
- You weight community size — 20K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick tinyauth if
- You want the tinyauth feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tinyauth fits your workflow better
About casbin
Apache Casbin ==== News : still worry about how to write the correct Apache Casbin policy? Apache Casbin online editor is coming to help! Try it at: Apache Casbin is a powerful and efficient open source access control library for Golang projects. It provides support for enforcing authorization based on various access control models. All the languages supported by Apache Casbin: Table of contents Supported models How it works? Features Installation Documentation Online editor Tutorials Get started Policy management Policy persistence Policy consistence between multiple nodes Role manager Benchmarks Examples…
read the full casbin overview →
About tinyauth
Tinyauth The tiniest OpenID Certified™ authorization and authentication server you have ever seen. Tinyauth is the simplest and tiniest authentication and authorization server you have ever seen. It is designed to both work as an authentication middleware for your apps, offering support for OAuth, LDAP and access controls, and as a standalone authentication server. It supports all the popular proxies like Traefik, Nginx and Caddy. [!WARNING] Tinyauth is in active development and configuration may change often. Please make sure to carefully read the release notes before updating. [!NOTE] This is the main…
read the full tinyauth overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is casbin or tinyauth more popular?
casbin has 20,478 GitHub stars and tinyauth has 8,478. casbin has the larger community by that measure.
Are casbin and tinyauth free?
Both are open source. casbin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tinyauth under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between casbin and tinyauth?
casbin is written in Go and tinyauth in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, casbin or tinyauth?
Choose casbin if you want the larger community (20,478 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tinyauth if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.