head to head · open source
tinyauth vs xxl-sso
tinyauth has 8,498 GitHub stars, 292 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped yesterday. xxl-sso has 2,010 stars, 829 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. tinyauth leads on adoption by 323% (8,498 vs 2,010 stars). tinyauth is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; xxl-sso is written in Java under GPL-3.0. tinyauth has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, xxl-sso 41%. tinyauth was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (authentication, sso), 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
| tinyauth | xxl-sso | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.5K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-12 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 292 | ⑂ 829 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick tinyauth if
- You weight community size — 8.5K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick xxl-sso if
- You want the xxl-sso feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and xxl-sso fits your workflow better
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 →
About xxl-sso
XXL SSO XXL SSO, A Distributed Single Sign On Framework. Home Page Introduction XXL SSO is a single sign on framework that allows you to access all trusted applications with just one login. It has "lightweight, highly scalable, progressive" and other features, supports "login authentication, permissions (role) authentication, distributed session authentication, single sign on, Web login, Native(front end separation) login" and other multi login and authentication types. Now, it's already open source code, real "out of the box". XXL SSO 是一个 单点登录框架，只需要登录一次就可以访问所有相互信任的应用系统。具备 “轻量级、高扩展、渐进式” 的等特性，支持…
read the full xxl-sso overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is tinyauth or xxl-sso more popular?
tinyauth has 8,498 GitHub stars and xxl-sso has 2,010. tinyauth has the larger community by that measure.
Are tinyauth and xxl-sso free?
Both are open source. tinyauth is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and xxl-sso under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between tinyauth and xxl-sso?
tinyauth is written in Go and xxl-sso in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, tinyauth or xxl-sso?
Choose tinyauth if you want the larger community (8,498 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose xxl-sso if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.