Providing a sound user experience with security is one of the most critical parts of app success. But as a developer, no one likes to implement a “forgot password” feature for every other app! Implementing token generation and maintaining a bulky authentication flow can haunt your time to market for the next big thing.
Without a doubt, authentication is one of the most critical aspects of many applications we develop. But in today’s era, where competition is high, businesses cannot spend too much time developing basic features to get their core services available.
Serverless authentication helps developers focus on solving real business problems rather than engaging in some boring auth flows. Today, there are many solutions available to implement authentication with utmost ease in your applications. Here, we have analyzed the top serverless auth providers to help you make an informed decision for your next unicorn idea.
Firebase Authentication
Pricing: 100 percent free. SMS charges applied after first 10k SMS
Overview: Firebase Authentication provides a fully managed backend service, SDKs, and UI libraries to implement auth within just a few minutes. It supports password login, SMS login, and third-party login via Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Github, etc.
Firebase also has anonymous login to help users create a guest account in your application. Firebase Authentication integrates natively with the larger Firebase ecosystem of features that can help develop and grow apps faster.
Integration effort: Very minimal — it comes with UI components for Android, iOS, web that handle the UI flows for signing in users. Secure and easy!
Best Features: Anonymous login. This allows the user to set up a temporary anonymous account that can be upgraded to a regular version later.
AWS Amplify (via Amazon Cognito)
Pricing: Free tier up to 50,000 MAUs.
Overview: AWS Amplify is a serverless suite for web and mobile developers to quickly implement many valuable features. Amplify uses Amazon Cognito under the hood to provide an authentication feature. It supports standard email password login and social login, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and, of course, AWS Amplify.
Integration effort: Very minimal. Comes with UI components for Android, iOS, and web.
Best features: Multifactor authentication. Amazon Cognito has generous MFA support. Your users can use SMS text messages or time-based one-time passwords as a second factor.
Auth0
Pricing: Up to 7,000 active users, unlimited logins
Overview: Unlike other solutions discussed above, Auth0 is made specifically for authentication purposes; they claim to you’ll have your auth ready within five minutes. Auth0 has top-notch security and a very easy-to-use interface to manage user identities, from creating, provisioning, blocking, and deleting users to simple password resets.
It also integrates well with IoT devices for the machine-to-machine communication. It supports social logins and multifactor authentication, including SMS and email. Auth0 also offers breached password detection to notify your users when a third party’s data breach leaks their credentials.
Integration effort: Very minimal. Auth0 offers 30-plus SDKs and quickstarts to help you succeed in your implementation.
Best features: Security. It automatically blocks any IP addresses trying to brute-force logins and will notify you via email.
Parse
Pricing: Open source requires a server for deployment. Back4App has hosting services with 10k requests.
Overview: Parse Server is an open-source backend that can be deployed to any infrastructure that can run Node.js. Parse includes support for a wide range of third-party logins, including WeChat and Weibo. After Facebook departed from the Parse platform, it has been maintained by an active open-source community.
Integration effort: Quite high for the OS version since it requires deployment on your server.
Best features: No vendor lock-in. You are in full control of your data and can opt out without much hassle.
Backendless
Pricing: Free for individuals and small businesses. Pricing here.
Overview: Backendless User Management comes with a complete set of features for managing authentication and authorization in your app. With the support of custom user properties, integration with your core features becomes simple and easy. You can integrate Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Auth0 into your app for social media login.
It allows you to enable session timeouts — after a specified period of inactivity, users will automatically be logged out. For paid subscription services, there’s a multiple logins feature that enables developers to control the number of simultaneous logins, ensuring credentials are used with only the allowed number of sessions.
Integration effort: Minimal effort; managed cloud and UI libraries available.
Best features: Custom user properties — for example, a user’s location. You can add any property with just a few clicks. Additionally, you can set default values and create custom data validators to protect your data’s integrity.
FusionAuth
Pricing: Free for self-hosted; hosted version is paid.
Overview: Fully customizable auth service that allows you to alter themes, password constraints, email templates, localization, messaging, etc. It can be used in headless mode wherein you can implement your UI and use given APIs. Just like WordPress page builders, you can set up the FusionAuth interface from your back office.
Integration effort: Quite high for the open-source version since it requires deployment on your server.
Best features: No vendor lock-in; you are in full control of your data and can opt out without much hassle.
Conclusion
Serverless tools allow developers to focus on the core features of their application by performing all the heavy lifting required for those core features to shine. Web and mobile development is moving at an ever-increasing pace, and developing the same old authentication flow every few months isn’t cool. These service can do it for you to get you up and running fast.
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