ZITADEL is a Swiss-built, open-source identity platform that bundles SSO, MFA, passkeys, SAML, OIDC, and SCIM with native multi-tenancy. It is one of the strongest Auth0 and Keycloak alternatives for B2B SaaS teams that need self-hosting plus an event-sourced audit trail.
ZITADEL is an open-source identity and access management platform from Switzerland that competes head-on with Auth0, Keycloak, and Authentik. We rate it 86/100 — it is the strongest pick if you are building a B2B SaaS, need real multi-tenancy, and want the option to self-host on your own Postgres without giving up modern features like passkeys, SCIM 2.0, and a full event-sourced audit trail.
ZITADEL is built by CAOS AG, a Swiss company founded in by Florian Forster (CEO), Fabienne Bühler (CPO), and a team of identity infrastructure veterans in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The company has raised roughly $11.5M across a $2.5M seed and a follow-on Series A, and runs a hosted ZITADEL Cloud product alongside the open-source repo on GitHub.
The reason teams reach for ZITADEL instead of rolling their own auth or paying Auth0's per-MAU bill is that it gives you everything modern identity platforms ship — SSO, MFA, OIDC, SAML 2.0, SCIM 2.0, passkeys, social and enterprise IdP brokering — but with a strict multi-tenant hierarchy (Identity System → Organizations → Projects) and the same codebase running on ZITADEL Cloud and your own server. Every mutation is written as an immutable event, so the audit trail is the database, not an afterthought.
The longest-running ZITADEL discussion on Hacker News (item 31408059) is titled "Zitadel: The best of Auth0 and Keycloak combined," and the recurring praise across that thread, GitHub Discussions, and r/selfhosted is that the same image runs on Cloud and on a homelab Postgres without configuration drift. Developers also call out the docs and the Discord community — the team is genuinely responsive on issues.
The honest pushback is twofold. First, the 2025 license change from Apache 2.0 to AGPL 3.0 on the main repo was unpopular with some adopters who had built downstream products against the older license; you'll see this come up on Reddit threads about open-source identity in 2025 and 2026. Second, ZITADEL Cloud's lowest paid tier sits at $100/month for 25,000 daily active users, which is excellent for production SaaS but a meaningful jump for hobby projects that outgrow the 100-DAU free tier — several Product Hunt and Reddit comments flag this gap.
ZITADEL is dual-licensed: the main repo is AGPL 3.0 (post-2025) for free self-hosting, with Apache 2.0 and MIT carve-outs for SDKs and selected directories. ZITADEL Cloud is pay-as-you-go and starts free.
| Plan | Price | Daily Active Users | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free (Cloud) | $0/month | 100 DAUs | Unlimited total users, MFA, passkeys, audit logs, 3 IdPs. |
| Pro (Cloud) | $100/month base | Up to 25,000 DAUs | Custom domain, additional usage billed per volume. |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom | Dedicated SLA, premium support, technical account manager. |
| Self-hosted | Free (AGPL) | Unlimited | Run on your own Postgres; commercial support available. |
Best for: B2B SaaS teams that need real multi-tenant identity (think project-management tools, vertical SaaS, dev platforms), regulated companies that need a self-hostable IdP with a complete audit log, and anyone who has been quoted a six-figure Auth0 enterprise contract and wants an open-source escape hatch with feature parity.
Not ideal for: Pure consumer apps with a single tenant where Clerk, Stack Auth, or Better Auth ship faster, and homelab users who can't tolerate the AGPL obligations on derivative works.
Pros:
Cons:
The closest competitors are Keycloak (the long-standing open-source IAM from Red Hat — more mature, less opinionated, no built-in B2B model), Better Auth (TypeScript-first, code-as-config, far simpler but lacks SCIM and SAML at the same depth), and Stack Auth (the open-source Auth0 alternative, strong DX, less mature multi-tenancy than ZITADEL).
If you are shipping a B2B product and your auth requirements include organizations, projects, SCIM provisioning, and a real audit trail — ZITADEL is the most capable open-source option on the market in 2026, and it earns the 86/100 rating despite the AGPL friction. The pricing gap between free and Pro is a real consideration for hobbyists, but for any team building a commercial SaaS, $100/month for production-grade multi-tenant identity is a bargain compared to Auth0 or Okta. Self-host first, move to ZITADEL Cloud when you don't want to operate Postgres anymore.
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