Authentik is an open-source identity provider that supports a number of authentication protocols, including OAuth2, SAML, LDAP, and SCIM.

It is designed to provide site administrators, developers, and security engineers with a reliable solution that can be used in almost every environment.

Authentik includes an admin console where users and groups, tokens and credentials, application integrations, events, and Flows can be created and managed. In Authentik, Flows represent the stages of the authentication process, which are the single verification or logic steps that happen during the process. 

There is also a user console which displays the applications and integrations that authentik has been implemented in. 

It was created in 2018 by Jens Langhammer, and had drummed up excitement in the industry by 2021, leading to talks about building a company around the project in 2022, which did end up happening after being funded by a venture capital firm, Open Core Ventures. 

Now there are two versions of the projects, an open-source version and an Enterprise version with support and added features.

“There are hundreds of thousands of open source projects out there; to have authentik selected, and deemed robust and useful enough to receive backing and support, with an opportunity to turn it into a proper company with the resources needed to keep building new features, was a remarkable opportunity,” Authentik Security wrote in a blog post. 

When authentik was turned into a company, Langhammer wrote: “The current version of authentik will stay open source and continue to be developed. We will add business-focused features like auditing and compliance to the source-available enterprise version over time. No existing features will be removed from the open source version with the intention of adding them to the enterprise version. Features might still be deprecated, but they won’t show up on the enterprise version. Features from the enterprise version will regularly be open-sourced. In fact, a lot of resources will go into the open source version, so everyone can benefit from them.”

As of August 2024, the open-source project has over 11K stars on GitHub and nearly 300 contributors.

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