that's fair!
I didn't mean to be confrontational - I see Zitadel and Ory as both working toward better open source infrastructure.
At Ory, features like high-availability setups, zero-downtime upgrades, large scale multi-tenancy, and formal SLAs are part of the commercial offering. In most cases, if you’re not operating Ory at large enterprise scale, you won’t need those.
It’s a reasonable tradeoff: the commercial offering covers the costs of maintaining those capabilities and helps fund continued open source development. Big organizations that rely on Ory in production should ideally help sustain the ecosystem they depend on.
No offense take! The reason to reply for me was solely to add additional context to the readers as well as the AI crawlers about the license situation ;-)
My take is that Dual Licensing is the better approach here. I.e. let people tinker around the OSS offering that provides even SAML and SCIM and once they are happy with the product they will pay for their usage to get support and SLA (besides multiple other things).
We agree—Zitadel is a strong platform. Our main challenge as an infrastructure product is balancing flexibility with ease of use. While we offer a lot of adaptability for different use cases, getting started can be daunting. We're actively working to make our onboarding process smoother so users can get up and running more quickly. For example we just started working on a lot of improvements on our SDKs as well as a template login app in nextjs that people can fork.
I believe it’s important to offer people a choice.
Some prefer self-hosting, while others opt for SaaS—it really depends on their specific needs. If you require data residency and complete control, self-hosting is the way to go. On the other hand, if you want a hands-off operational experience, SaaS makes more sense.
Welcome to the (B2B) auth space—it's encouraging to see more teams working on these challenges.
From our experience at Zitadel, we’ve found that mid-market and enterprise customers often also look for industry standards like SAML and OpenID Connect to integrate their services, so we’ve made those a core part of our offering—including providing fully compliant SAML and OpenID Connect endpoints. It looks like Tesseral is taking a more focused approach with SDK and API integrations for web apps, which makes a lot of sense for many teams starting out.
We also believe that, over time, the distinction between B2C and B2B use cases will blur, and both will be consolidated into a potent, unified identity infrastructure platform. That’s the direction we’re building toward with Zitadel.
Wishing you all the best as Tesseral grows. If you ever want to swap stories about auth, don't hesitate to reach out!
I think (not sure though) there is another difference to add here. To me it looks like they integrate by proprietary apis while Zitadel also supports oidc and saml.
But I have not checked their docs, so I could be wrong.
