head to head · open source
authelia vs tinyauth
authelia has 29,569 GitHub stars, 1,539 forks, 137 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tinyauth has 8,478 stars, 289 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped today. authelia leads on adoption by 249% (29,569 vs 8,478 stars). authelia is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tinyauth is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. authelia has attracted 5% 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 3 topic tags (2fa, authentication, golang), 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
| authelia | tinyauth | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 8.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 289 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick authelia if
- You weight community size — 30K 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 authelia
<img alt="SLSA 3" src="
read the full authelia 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 authelia or tinyauth more popular?
authelia has 29,569 GitHub stars and tinyauth has 8,478. authelia has the larger community by that measure.
Are authelia and tinyauth free?
Both are open source. authelia is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tinyauth under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between authelia and tinyauth?
authelia 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, authelia or tinyauth?
Choose authelia if you want the larger community (29,569 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.