Tesseral

At a Glance:

Tesseral is open-source, multi-tenant authentication infrastructure built for B2B SaaS, offering an API-first cloud service with SDKs for common frameworks, self-service customer settings, and pre-built UI for login methods, RBAC, and enterprise SSO.

Overview:

Tesseral is an open-source authentication infrastructure service designed specifically for business software. It provides a multi-tenant, API-first platform that handles user management for B2B SaaS applications, working independently of any specific language or framework. The project includes hosted, customizable login pages, self-service configuration portals for end-customers, and pre-built integrations for enterprise protocols like SAML, OIDC, and SCIM. Developers can integrate Tesseral using its managed cloud service or choose to self-host the platform, and it offers official SDKs for frameworks such as Next.js, React, Express, Python, Golang, and Rust.

Key Decision Points:

• Designed for B2B SaaS: It is built for multi-tenant business software where each customer's admins manage their own users and login settings, not general-purpose consumer authentication.

• Deployment options: You can use the managed cloud service at console.tesseral.com or self-host the infrastructure.

• API-first integration: It is an external service that integrates via SDKs and API calls, not a library embedded directly into your application code.

• Framework support: Official SDKs are provided for Next.js, React, Express, Python frameworks (Flask, FastAPI, Django), Golang, and Rust (Axum).

Core Features:

• Hosted, customizable login pages: Prebuilt UIs that can be customized to match a brand, with login methods added or removed through the console.

• B2B multitenancy: Customer admins control how their users log in to their tenant and can add or remove users independently.

• User impersonation: Allows developers to log in as users to debug and support issues faster.

• Self-service customer config: Pre-built settings pages where customers can invite coworkers, edit login settings, and manage their account.

• Role-based access control (RBAC): Fine-grained permissions with pre-built UI and hasPermission calls for enforcement in application code.

• Enterprise single sign-on: Built-in support for SAML, OpenID Connect, and SCIM directory sync without requiring additional code.

• SDK-based backend integration: Backend SDKs provide require_auth() middleware and functions to extract organization_id(), credentials(), and has_permission() from validated access tokens.

Use Cases:

• Developers building a B2B SaaS product who need to add multi-tenant authentication with enterprise SSO capabilities.

• Teams wanting to give their business customers a self-service portal to manage their own users and login settings.

• Development teams who need to debug customer issues by safely impersonating users within their application.

• B2B SaaS applications that require API key management for customer-facing programmatic access.

Open-Source Alternative Value:

As an open-source project, Tesseral allows developers to self-host their authentication infrastructure, keeping user management and data within their own environment. The source code is available for inspection and customization, and the project is designed as a standalone service that integrates via documented SDKs rather than locking developers into a particular framework. It provides built-in support for enterprise protocols like SAML, OIDC, and SCIM, which are often restricted to paid tiers or proprietary platforms in commercial auth services.