head to head · open source
Zitadel vs rauthy
Zitadel has 15,159 GitHub stars, 1,342 forks, 1,171 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rauthy has 1,355 stars, 140 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Zitadel leads on adoption by 1,019% (15,159 vs 1,355 stars). Zitadel is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; rauthy is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Zitadel has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, rauthy 10%. Zitadel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (authentication, fido2, mfa, oidc), 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
| Zitadel | rauthy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-02 | 2026-10-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 140 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Zitadel if
- You weight community size — 15K 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 rauthy if
- You want the rauthy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and rauthy fits your workflow better
About Zitadel
Zitadel is an open source identity and access management platform written in Go and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It lives in the open source IAM ecosystem and provides identity infrastructure for developers who need to operate an authentication and authorization layer themselves.
read the full Zitadel overview →
About rauthy
Rauthy is a self hosted Single Sign On identity provider written in Rust that issues OpenID Connect and OAuth 2 tokens, supports PAM, and is aimed at teams that want to run their own authentication server — from a Raspberry Pi up to a high availability cluster — without operating a heavyweight stack like Keycloak.
read the full rauthy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Zitadel or rauthy more popular?
Zitadel has 15,159 GitHub stars and rauthy has 1,355. Zitadel has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zitadel and rauthy free?
Both are open source. Zitadel is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and rauthy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Zitadel and rauthy?
Zitadel is written in Go and rauthy in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Zitadel or rauthy?
Choose Zitadel if you want the larger community (15,159 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose rauthy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.