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Auth0 vs Squarespace: What are the differences?
In today's digital world, online security and website management are crucial aspects for both businesses and individuals. Auth0 and Squarespace are two popular platforms that offer different services in these areas. Below are the key differences between Auth0 and Squarespace:
Integration Capabilities: Auth0 is primarily an authentication and authorization platform that allows developers to add secure login functionalities to their applications. It provides extensive support for integrating with different types of applications, frameworks, and identity providers. On the other hand, Squarespace is a website builder and hosting platform that offers its own authentication system, but with limited integration capabilities compared to Auth0.
Customization Options: Squarespace provides users with a range of customizable templates and design options to create visually appealing websites without needing extensive coding knowledge. It offers a more user-friendly interface for customization, making it suitable for individuals or small businesses looking for a simple website solution. Auth0, however, focuses more on backend authentication and authorization processes, providing greater flexibility and customization options for developers to incorporate secure authentication workflows into their applications.
Scalability and Performance: Auth0 is designed to handle authentication and authorization workflows at scale, making it suitable for large enterprise applications with high user volumes. Its architecture allows for easy scaling and performance optimization. Squarespace, on the other hand, is a website builder and host, which means it may have limitations in terms of scalability and performance for complex and high-traffic websites.
Developer-Focused Features: Auth0 offers a range of features specifically designed for developers, including extensive documentation, SDKs, and libraries for different programming languages and frameworks. It also provides a developer-friendly dashboard to manage authentication and authorization workflows. Squarespace, while it does offer customization options, is more focused on providing a user-friendly interface for non-technical users, with fewer developer-centric features.
Pricing Structure: Auth0 follows a subscription-based pricing model that is based on the number of active users and the desired features, making it more suitable for applications with varying user volumes. Squarespace, on the other hand, offers different pricing plans based on website needs and requirements, with a fixed monthly fee. This makes Squarespace a more predictable and potentially more cost-effective solution for individuals and small businesses with consistent website traffic.
Support and Community: Auth0 has a dedicated support team and an active developer community that provides technical assistance and resources for developers utilizing the platform. They offer various support channels, including forums, documentation, and live chat. Squarespace, while it also provides customer support, primarily focuses on offering a more user-friendly support system for website building and customization, with less emphasis on developer-focused assistance.
In summary, Auth0 focuses on providing a robust authentication and authorization platform with extensive integration capabilities and customization options for developers, making it suitable for applications with complex authentication workflows. Squarespace, on the other hand, offers a user-friendly website building and hosting platform with customizable templates, making it more suitable for individuals and small businesses looking for a simple website solution.
We need to migrate our authentication system to an external solution. We have a Vue.js frontend and a set of Services (mostly in Python) that talk to each other through APIs. This platform is multitenant, having all tenants in the same DB (MongoDB) and discriminating between them with a parameter value. So I'll be grateful if someone can share their experiences with any of these three options!
If these three are your options, I would recommend going with Auth0. They have all functionality available as developer API (Okta e.g. not) so you can manage your instance with Infrastructure as code and can also easily add functionalities relatively easily with the API. They are also really powerful if we're talking about ABAC (Attribute based access control). You can also enrich your access token with custom claims from your MongoDB, that can be probably really useful, as you said that you're dealing with multi tenancy.
We're using Auth0 in combination with Fauna Fauna is a database, so it would challenge you're mongodb. But Faunadb is the first database that implemented a full end user ABAC system directly in the database. (And also a lot easier than the ABAC systems from Okta or Auth0). This helps us, to use Auth0 only as identity platform and doing all the authorization with enriched claims over Fauna. With that you can skip in a lot of the cases you're backend, and you can request directly from the frontend your database (Blazing fast). Also, you can replace in some years Auth0 a lot easier with some upcoming cheaper (Auth0 was bought by Okta for a hilarious price) and "easy to use" passwordless identity provider like Passage.id
Currently, Passport.js repo has 324 open issues, and Jared (the original author) seems to be the one doing most of the work. Also, given that the documentation is not proper. Is it worth using Passport.js?
As of now, StackShare shows it has 29 companies using it. How do you implement auth in your project or your company? Are there any good alternatives to Passport.js? Should I implement auth from scratch?
I would recommend Auth0 only if you are willing to shell out money. You can keep up with their free version only for a very limited time and as per our experience as a growing startup where budget is an issue, their support was not very helpful as they first asked us to sign a commercial agreement even before helping us t o find out whether Auth0 fits our use case or not! But otherwise Auth0 is a great platform to speed up authentication. In our case we had to move to alternatives like Casbin for multi-tenant authorization!
Using Auth0 and JWT with a simple session management server is easy and takes care of a lot of the hassle of setting up authentication. We feel safe having Auth0 handle and store our user data knowing their databases are way more secure than anything we could have setup ourselves. They also provide great tools like WebHooks and action events to pull critical metadata to our API when we need it.
I usually take a slightly different tack because the technical level of people I usually am dealing with is lower. I tend to be pitching to decision makers and not tech people. A bit of my standard answer is below.
Wix and Squarespace are proprietary systems meant for unsophisticated users who want to build their own websites quickly and easily. While they are good for that specific use case, they do not offer any way to move beyond that if your needs arise. Since they are proprietary closed systems if you need something more advanced at some point your only option is to start over.
WordPress is an Open Source CMS that allows much more freedom. It is not quite as simple to setup and create a new site but if you are talking to me then you are not looking to build it yourself so that is really a non-issue. The main benefit of WordPress is freedom. You can host it on virtually any decent web hosting service and since it uses PHP and MySQL you can have virtually any developer take over a project without problem.
I believe in open source because of that freedom. It is good for me as a developer and it is good for my clients. If something were to happen to me or my company you would have no problem finding another qualified WordPress developer to take over the site in a totally seamless fashion. There would be no need to start from scratch.
Additionally the extensible nature of WordPress means that no matter what your future needs, WordPress can handle it. Adding things like e-commerce and custom quoting systems are just two examples of advanced solution's that I have added to WordPress sites years after they were first built.
WordPress is used by tiny one person businesses all the way up to major websites like the NY Times and I think it is right for this project as well.
I started our team on Amazon Cognito because I was a Solutions Architect at AWS and found it really easy to follow the tutorials and get a basic app up and running with it.
When our team started working with it, they very quickly became frustrated because of the poor documentation. After 4 days of trying to get all the basic passwordless auth working, our lead engineer made the decision to abandon it and try Auth0... and managed to get everything implemented in 4 hours.
The consensus was that Cognito just isn't mature enough or well-documented, and that the implementation does not cater for real world use cases the way that it should. I believe Amplify has made some of this simpler, but I would still recommend Auth0 as it's been bulletproof for us, and is a sensible price.
Pros of Auth0
- JSON web token70
- Integration with 20+ Social Providers31
- It's a universal solution20
- SDKs20
- Amazing Documentation15
- Heroku Add-on11
- Enterprise support8
- Great Sample Repos7
- Extend platform with "rules"7
- Azure Add-on4
- Easy integration, non-intrusive identity provider3
- Passwordless3
- It can integrate seamlessly with firebase2
- Great documentation, samples, UX and Angular support2
- Polished2
- On-premise deployment2
- Will sign BAA for HIPAA-compliance1
- MFA1
- Active Directory support1
- Springboot1
- SOC21
- SAML Support1
- Great support1
- OpenID Connect (OIDC) Support1
Pros of Squarespace
- Easy setup35
- Clean designs31
- Beautiful responsive themes8
- Easy ongoing maintenance6
- Live chat & 24/7 support team3
- No coding necessary1
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Cons of Auth0
- Pricing too high (Developer Pro)15
- Poor support7
- Rapidly changing API4
- Status page not reflect actual status4
Cons of Squarespace
- Hard to use custom code1