Faable Auth vs Authelia
Short answer: they solve different problems. Authelia is a self-hosted single sign-on portal that sits next to a reverse proxy and puts a login gate in front of services that have no authentication of their own — the classic homelab and internal-tooling use case. Faable Auth is a managed, multi-tenant OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect identity server that your own application integrates with, so your users sign up and log in to your product.
If you’re protecting Grafana, Sonarr or an internal dashboard behind Traefik, Authelia is likely the better tool. If you’re shipping a SaaS with its own user base, Authelia isn’t designed for that.
Quick comparison
| Capability | Faable Auth | Authelia |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Fully managed | Self-hosted (you run it, plus Redis/DB) |
| Primary job | Identity for apps you build | Gate in front of apps you deploy |
| OAuth 2.0 / OIDC provider | ✅ | ✅ (OpenID Certified™) |
| Forward auth for a reverse proxy | ❌ | ✅ (its core feature) |
| User store | Managed, with a user API | LDAP, or a YAML file |
| Self-service signup | ✅ | ❌ (users are provisioned by an admin) |
| Social login (Google, GitHub, Microsoft) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Passwordless (magic link / OTP) | ✅ | ❌ as a first factor |
| MFA / 2FA | ❌ not yet | ✅ TOTP, WebAuthn/passkeys, Duo push |
| SAML | ❌ not yet | ❌ (on their roadmap) |
| Machine-to-machine (M2M) tokens | ✅ | Limited |
| Multi-tenant by design | ✅ | ❌ single instance, single directory |
| RBAC / Teams | ✅ | Access-control rules per resource |
| Extensibility in the login flow | ✅ Actions + Webhooks | Configuration-driven rules |
| Cost | Included from the Free plan | Free & open source — you pay in infra + ops |
| 100% European hosting + GDPR sovereignty | ✅ | Wherever you host it |
Competitor capabilities change frequently — confirm current details in Authelia’s own docs and roadmap.
When Faable Auth is the better fit
- You’re building a product with its own users. Sign-up, email verification, password reset, social login and a user API come with it; Authelia expects users to already exist in LDAP or a config file.
- You’re multi-tenant. Each Faable account is an isolated tenant with its own clients, users and signing keys. Authelia is one instance, one directory.
- You don’t want to run identity infrastructure. No container, no Redis, no session store, no upgrade window, no PostgreSQL to back up.
- You need machine-to-machine tokens for service-to-service calls — Client Credentials against a registered API.
- You need European data sovereignty without operating the servers yourself.
When Authelia might fit better
- You’re protecting self-hosted services behind a reverse proxy. Forward auth with Traefik, nginx or Caddy is exactly what Authelia is for, and Faable Auth does not do it.
- You want MFA today. TOTP, WebAuthn/passkeys and Duo push are built in — Faable Auth has no second factor yet.
- Everything must stay on your own hardware, with no third party involved at any point.
- Your user directory is already LDAP and you want to keep it as the source of truth.
Can they coexist?
Yes, and it’s a reasonable setup: Authelia in front of your internal infrastructure, Faable Auth for the product your customers log into. They don’t compete for the same requests.
Related
- Faable Auth vs Auth0, Clerk & Keycloak — the closest comparison if you’re weighing self-hosted Keycloak too.
- Faable Auth vs Supabase Auth · vs AWS Cognito · vs Firebase Authentication
- What is a multi-tenant identity server?
- Get Started with Faable Auth
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