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kratos
Go2020–2025
ory / kratos

kratos

Headless cloud-native authentication and identity management written in Go. Scales to a billion+ users. Replace Homegrown, Auth0, Okta, Firebase with better UX and DX. Passkeys, Social Sign In, OIDC, Magic Link, Multi-Factor Auth, SMS, SAML, TOTP, and more. Runs everywhere, runs best on Ory Network.

32Distinct people
36Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
14KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Headless cloud-native authentication and identity management written in Go. Scales to a billion+ users. Replace Homegrown, Auth0, Okta, Firebase with better UX and DX. Passkeys, Social Sign In, OIDC, Magic Link, Multi-Factor Auth, SMS, SAML, TOTP, and more. Runs everywhere, runs best on Ory Network.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year36 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-08-29 06:10:06 UTC to 2025-11-13 14:14:36 UTC.

02468102020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 2 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 3 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC927
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC532
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Chat · Discussions · Newsletter · Docs · Try Ory Network · Jobs Ory Kratos is an API first identity and user management system for cloud native applications. It centralizes login, registration, recovery, verification, and profile management flows so your services consume them instead of reimplementing them. Table of contents What is Ory Kratos? Why Ory Kratos Migrating from Auth0, Okta, and similar providers Deployment options Use Ory Kratos on the Ory Network Self-host Ory Kratos Quickstart Who is using it? What is Ory Kratos? Ory Kratos is an API first identity and user management system that follows cloud architecture best practices. It focuses on core identity workflows that almost every application needs: Self service login and registration Account verification and recovery Multi factor authentication Profile and account management Identity schemas and traits Admin APIs for lifecycle management We recommend starting with the Ory Kratos introduction docs to learn more about its architecture, feature set, and how it compares to other systems. Why Ory Kratos Ory Kratos is designed to: Remove identity logic from your application code and expose it over HTTP APIs Work well with any UI framework through browser based and native app flows Scale to large numbers of identities and devices Integrate with the rest of the Ory stack for OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and access control Fit into modern cloud native environments such as Kubernetes and managed platforms Migrating from Auth0, Okta, and similar providers If you are migrating from Auth0, Okta, or another identity provider that uses OAuth2 / OpenID Connect based login, consider using Ory Hydra + Ory Kratos together: Ory Hydra acts as the OAuth2 and OpenID Connect provider and can replace most authorization server and token issuing capabilities of your existing IdP. Ory Kratos provides identity, credentials, and user-facing flows (login, registration, recovery, verification, profile management). This combination is often a drop-in replacement for OAuth2 and OpenID Connect capabilities at the protocol level. In practice, you update client configuration and endpoints to point to Hydra, migrate identities into Kratos, and keep your applications speaking the same OAuth2 / OIDC protocols they already use. Deployment options You can run Ory Kratos in two main ways: As a managed service on the Ory Network As a self hosted service under your own control, with or without the Ory Enterprise License Use Ory Kratos on the Ory Network The Ory Network is the fastest way to use Ory services in production. Ory Identities is powered by the open source Ory Kratos server and is API compatible. The Ory Network provides: Identity and credential management that scales to billions of users and devices Registration, login, and account management flows for passkeys, biometrics, social login, SSO, and multi factor authentication Prebuilt login, registration, and account management pages and components OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for single sign on, API access, and machine to machine authorization Low latency permission checks based on the Zanzibar model with the Ory Permission Language GDPR friendly storage with data locality and compliance in mind Web based Ory Console and Ory CLI for administration and operations Cloud native APIs compatible with the open source servers Fair, usage based pricing Sign up for a free developer account to get started. Self-host Ory Kratos You can run Ory Kratos yourself for full control over infrastructure, deployment, and customization. The install guide explains how to: Install Kratos on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Docker Configure databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and CockroachDB Deploy to Kubernetes and other orchestration systems Build Kratos from source This guide uses the open source distribution to get you started without license requirements. It is a great fit for individuals, researchers, hackers, and companies that want to experiment, prototype, or run unimportant workloads without SLAs. You get the full core engine, and you are free to inspect, extend, and build it from source. If you run Kratos as part of a business-critical system, for example login and account recovery for all your users, you should use a commercial agreement to reduce operational and security risk. The Ory Enterprise License (OEL) layers on top of self-hosted Kratos and provides: Additional enterprise features that are not available in the open source version such as SCIM, SAML, organization login ("SSO"), CAPTCHAs and more Regular security releases, including CVE patches, with service level agreements Support for advanced scaling, multi-tenancy, and complex deployments Premium support options with SLAs, direct access to engineers, and onboarding help Access to a private Docker registry with frequent and vetted, up-to-date enterprise builds For guaranteed CVE fixes, current enterprise builds, advanced features, and support in production, you need a valid Ory Enterprise License and access to the Ory Enterprise Docker registry. To learn more, contact the Ory team. Quickstart Install the Ory CLI and create a new project to try Ory Identities. # Install the Ory CLI if you do not have it yet: bash <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ory/meta/master/install.sh) -b . ory sudo mv ./ory /usr/local/bin/ # Sign in or sign up ory auth # Create a new project ory create project --create-workspace "Ory Open Source" --name "GitHub Quickstart" --use-project ory open ax login Who is using it? The Ory community stands on the shoulders of individuals, companies, and maintainers. The Ory team thanks everyone involved - from submitting bug reports and feature requests, to contributing patches and documentation. The Ory community counts more than 50.000 members and is growing. The Ory stack protects 7.000.000.000+ API requests every day across thousands of companies. None of this would have been possible without each and everyone
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

36 sources
I think it would be fair to say that kratos was not the priority in 2022 in terms of code you can see not much was commited (https://github.com/ory/kratos/graphs/code-frequency) so I might have had a bad first impression. A few issues on kratos that I consider relatively important are still missing / nobody from Ory is giving their input so it's hard to make progress and I would not take my time to contribute if I dont know if the owner are going to merge it. An example that comes to mind is the OAuth email auto-verification or the search of users that is still super basic (we only recently got the filter of identifiers).
In Blueprint for a distributed multi-region IAM with Go and CockroachDB
Sorry to hear that this has been your experience! What exactly was the issue for you? It’s true that there are lots of open PRs. We’re a small team and often busy with customer requirements which doesn’t allow us to get some community PRs over the finishing line (finish tests, refactor code, fix remaining bugs, do security reviews, …). Sometimes, PRs are not aligning with an architecture or API principle which is when they often go stale. This is why we generally require design documents for changes or additions to APIs. Saying that the open source is second class is a false accusation in my view: - Over 1500 PRs merged in Ory Kratos alone: https://github.com/ory/kratos/pulls - Very active contributor and commit frequency: https://github.com/ory/kratos/graphs/contributors?from=2018-... - A growing community and footprint Also, we do offer
Read the rest
support contracts for self hosted environments - this is relatively new though: https://www.ory.dev/support/ It is true though that have to balance open source work and things that people pay us for. It’s the only way to ensure that Ory open source, for which we have a deep commitment, continues for a long time. Hope this makes sense!
In Blueprint for a distributed multi-region IAM with Go and CockroachDB

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