head to head · open source
Zitadel vs tinyauth
Zitadel has 15,526 GitHub stars, 1,420 forks, 1,171 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. tinyauth has 8,478 stars, 289 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped today. Zitadel leads on adoption by 83% (15,526 vs 8,478 stars). Zitadel is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; tinyauth is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Zitadel 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 3 topic tags (2fa, authentication, 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 | tinyauth | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 8.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 289 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Zitadel if
- You weight community size — 16K 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 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 Zitadel
The Identity Infrastructure for Developers ZITADEL is an open source identity and access management platform built for teams that need more than basic auth. Whether you're securing a SaaS product, building a B2B platform, or self hosting a production IAM stack — ZITADEL gives you everything out of the box: SSO, MFA, Passkeys, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and a battle tested multi tenancy model. No vendor lock in. No compromise on control. Just a robust, API first identity platform you can own. 🏡 Website 💬 Chat 📋 Docs 🧑💻 Blog 📞 Contact Why ZITADEL We built ZITADEL to handle the hardest IAM challenges at scale —…
read the full Zitadel 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 Zitadel or tinyauth more popular?
Zitadel has 15,526 GitHub stars and tinyauth has 8,478. Zitadel has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zitadel and tinyauth free?
Both are open source. Zitadel is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and tinyauth under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Zitadel and tinyauth?
Zitadel 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, Zitadel or tinyauth?
Choose Zitadel if you want the larger community (15,526 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tinyauth if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.