Buyer questions
Build vs buy authentication: an honest decision framework
What building authentication in-house really involves — protocols, sessions, recovery, MFA, isolation, on-call — and when building is the right call.
The short answer
Build authentication yourself when identity is core to your product's differentiation, you have security engineers to own it indefinitely, or your constraints rule out every vendor. Buy when identity is necessary but not differentiating — which is most products. The deciding cost is rarely the first version; it is years of maintaining sessions, recovery, MFA, protocol updates and incident response.
Sources last reviewed .
What 'auth' actually includes
- Password storage, breached-password checks and rate limiting.
- Sessions: lifetimes, revocation, device inventory.
- Account recovery and email verification.
- MFA and, increasingly, passkeys.
- OAuth and OpenID Connect if anything else must integrate.
- Tenant isolation, roles and per-tenant policy for B2B.
- SSO and SCIM when enterprise customers arrive.
- Audit logs, monitoring, and on-call for the login path.
Questions that decide it
- Who will own this in three years, and is that a security role?
- Can you pass a customer's security review on your own implementation?
- What do you lose if the vendor is down, and what is the exit path?
- Does the vendor use open standards (OIDC, OAuth) so leaving is a migration rather than a rewrite?
In Authreads
How this applies to Authreads
For a fuller comparison of building your own against Authreads, including where building wins, see the build-your-own comparison under /alternatives.
Authreads is a multi-tenant identity platform in beta. Capability status is maintained on /roadmap as Available, In progress or Planned.
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Building on any of this?
Tell us what you're putting together. We'll tell you plainly whether Authreads fits it.