This authentik release introduces major updates, including Object Lifecycle Management, WS-Federation support, and significant SCIM provider enhancements contributed by our community.

Let's take a closer look at what's in the 2026.2 release of authentik, your favorite identity provider.

When organizations evaluate Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, there are a lot of dimensions to consider: product capabilities, reliability, customer support, operational complexity, compliance, and more.

Practically, one major consideration for any organization considering an enterprise rollout is the total cost of ownership. And unfortunately, the "sticker price" is rarely the full story.

Once you start adding up common real-world requirements for a modern Identity Provider - basics, such as adaptive security, API access, support for workforce versus customer identity management, and the operational costs of integrating the platform, the true total cost can be substantially higher than expected.

At Authentik Security, we have a lot of conversations with customers who initially compare Okta's base "$X/user/month" price to our own Enterprise pricing when considering the cost of a new rollout. We have just as many conversations with long-time Okta users - those looking to migrate away from Okta - who have often found the true cost of ownership to be many multiples of their original quoted starting price.

Any sufficiently large enterprise contract will likely include some custom terms and volume discounting from any vendor, so the following is not meant to be an exact dollar-for-dollar comparison that can apply to any situation. But given the unexpected Okta pricing journey we've heard from many disgruntled customers over time, I felt it was worth attempting a fair comparison of costs in more detail than might be easily gleaned from a pricing page.

Let's break it down by category:

We are excited to share our vision for Extended Identity and Access Management - XIAM - as authentik expands our ability to secure IAM across all users, devices, and resources, flexibly and resiliently.

I genuinely apologize for releasing yet another acronym on the security world, but this is what we've been steadily building toward for the past seven years, and frankly, none of the current approaches encompasses the breadth and depth of how identity and access management should look like.

With a nod to 1Password for being the first (I think) to mention "XAM" - Extended Access Management - we see a world in which Identity and Access Management are seamlessly managed and supported for everyone, everywhere - extending far beyond what any legacy identity provider or device management system can provide today.

Concretely, XIAM means having one identity and access system for:

• all users (human and non-human; workforce and customer)
• all devices and endpoints (any OS, passkeys, passwordless, biometrics, ...)
• all applications and resources (even legacy apps and remote systems)
• the full user lifecycle (seamless on/offboarding, self-service, management controls)
• running everywhere, resiliently (multi-region, multi-cloud, on-prem)

Let's dive into each of these in more detail:

This release of authentik brings some big features, like managing endpoint devices, exporting data, and an overhaul of our permissions system.

Let's take a closer look at what's in the 2025.12 release of authentik, your favorite identity provider.

For years, we relied on Django's built-in storage backend, which is a solid base for less complex projects, but as time passed we started to push it to its limits. However, that's not all on Django; we had some technical debt on our side. For example, before 2025.12, you could not upload a file directly to a brand; you had to provide a full URL. I'll dive into why this was the case later on.

To share some insight into how security teams talk, when in the comfort of our own team meetings, here's a little snapshot from last week:

The incident at Okta, with the full-circle failure of AI and the poor Okta engineer who AI-ed himself into a hot mess, generated a whole lot of conversation and took over our Friday meeting.

As Joshua Rogers aptly called it, the “AI slop security engineering” incident started with a report of two security issues to Okta's auth0/nextjs-auth0 project, along with a PR to fix it.

The incredible response from Okta was a downward-spiral of AI doing everything in the worst possible way: stripping the name of the contributor from the PR and committing it, then using AI to apologize for itself, and finally refusing to remove the AI-generated details of the commit and restore the contributor's attribution.

Even more interesting than the lurid details of the Okta's AI chasing its own tail, and painfully catching it, was our look inwards to how we each feel about AI, how we use it (sure, of course, we each use it to some varying degree), and what the professional and personal/moral implications are. This started a discussion amongst our team on how we collectively use, and don't use, AI in our daily professional lives.

We also discussed how we want to talk about our limited use of AI with you, our community.

In our 2025.10 release, we removed Redis as a required database. In this blog, we'll go over why we made that decision, why we wanted Redis in the first place, and how we went about removing Redis and instead relying fully on PostgreSQL.

In the software world, databases are often the unsung heroes, and decisions about their usage, schemas, and data storage practices are important, so we want to share our thinking behind this decision.

The 2025.8 release blog post was never posted. Curious about what you missed? Check the 2025.8 release notes.

This release of authentik brings some big features that you don't want to miss, including the addition of our most requested source provider.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s in the 2025.10 release of authentik, your favorite identity provider.

Starting with version 2025.10, authentik supports both SAML single logout and OpenID Connect (OIDC) front-channel logout and back-channel logout.

This means that when you terminate a session in authentik, it sends logout requests to all properly configured applications, ending sessions everywhere.

While SAML single logout has existed for years, OIDC logout specifications are newer, and back-channel logout in particular isn't yet widely adopted by many applications (service providers/relying parties) or other Identity Providers. Even the long supported SAML single logout usually only has front-channel support by applications and IdPs.

What is single logout?​

Single logout (SLO) is the natural complement to single sign-on. With single sign-on, once you authenticate to authentik, you can automatically access all other applications that use authentik as an identity provider. With single logout, once you log out of authentik, you're automatically logged out of all properly configured applications that you accessed through authentik.

Single logout works by leveraging the SAML protocol's single logout service URL and OIDC's front-channel and back-channel URLs specified in the spec. When a request is sent via the IdP to the application's configured logout URL, the application terminates the user's session.

Without single logout, when a user logs out of an IdP, their sessions stay active with every application they logged into, meaning either:

1. The user will have to manually visit each application and log out.

2. An administrator will have to visit each application manually and log out the user for them.

3. The user will end up leaving a plethora of orphaned accounts that may be vulnerable to being hijacked.

The first question you might be asking yourself after reading the title of this post is

"Why in the @#$%&! would you do that"

If that wasn't the first thing that came to your mind, you're probably wondering what EAP even is and why you should be so taken aback. Don't worry, I will try to answer both of these questions with this blog post.