Hanko: Open-source authentication and user management

Hanko is an open-source, API-first authentication solution purpose-built for the passwordless era.

“We focus on helping developers and organizations modernize their authentication flows by migrating users towards passkeys, while still supporting all common authentication methods like email/password, MFA, OAuth, as well as SAML SSO,” Felix Magedanz, CEO at Hanko, told Help Net Security.

“What truly sets us apart is our commitment to developer experience,” explained Magedanz.

Hanko is fully open source and licensed under AGPL v3, with a commercially supported cloud offering for those who want to avoid open-source copyleft obligations or hosting and managing the Hanko backend themselves.
The developers provide a clean, developer-friendly API surface and SDK designed for flexibility and ease of integration.
Hanko Elements — a set of open web components — allow developers to build secure, customizable auth UIs without locking into a specific frontend framework.

Future plans and download

Magedanz told us they’re actively working on expanding Hanko’s capabilities in several directions:

More customization options, such as support for user metadata and fine-grained control over SSO scopes.
Seamless, self-serve data migration between Hanko Cloud and self-hosted deployments — allowing users to switch freely between both modes.
New web components, including a user menu, organization switcher, and team invites with basic role-based authorization — all designed to make it even easier to implement full-featured auth experiences out of the box.

Hanko is available for free on GitHub.

Hanko: Open-source authentication and user management