Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
JSON Web Token vs Spring Security: What are the differences?
Developers describe JSON Web Token as "A JSON-based open standard for creating access tokens". JSON Web Token is an open standard that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed. On the other hand, Spring Security is detailed as "A powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework". It is a framework that focuses on providing both authentication and authorization to Java applications. The real power of Spring Security is found in how easily it can be extended to meet custom requirements.
JSON Web Token and Spring Security belong to "User Management and Authentication" category of the tech stack.
JSON Web Token and Spring Security are both open source tools. Spring Security with 3.63K GitHub stars and 3.2K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than JSON Web Token with 2.59K GitHub stars and 259 GitHub forks.
Twig World, Redsift, and Para are some of the popular companies that use JSON Web Token, whereas Spring Security is used by Monkey Exchange, Debut, and Monbanquet.fr. JSON Web Token has a broader approval, being mentioned in 29 company stacks & 15 developers stacks; compared to Spring Security, which is listed in 12 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.
I am working on building a platform in my company that will provide a single sign on to all of the internal products to the customer. To do that we need to build an Authorisation server to comply with the OIDC protocol. Earlier we had built the Auth server using the Spring Security OAuth project but since in Spring Security 5.x it is no longer supported we are planning to get over with it as well. Below are the 2 options that I was considering to replace the Spring Auth Server. 1. Keycloak 2. Okta 3. Auth0 Please advise which one to use.
It isn't clear if beside the AuthZ requirement you had others, but given the scenario you described my suggestion would for you to go with Keycloak. First of all because you have already an onpremise IdP and with Keycloak you could maintain that setup (if privacy is a concern). Another important point is configuration and customization: I would assume with Spring OAuth you might have had some custom logic around authentication, this can be easily reconfigured in Keycloak by leveraging SPI (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_development/index.html#_auth_spi). Finally AuthZ as a functionality is well developed, based on standard protocols and extensible on Keycloak (https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/authorization_services/)
You can also use Keycloak as an Identity Broker, which enables you to handle authentication on many different identity providers of your customers. With this setup, you are able to perform authorization tasks centralized.
We have good experience using Keycloak for SSO with OIDC with our Spring Boot based applications. It's free, easy to install and configure, extensible - so I recommend it.
Pros of JSON Web Token
Pros of Spring Security
- Easy to use3
- Java integration3
