Ory Kratos

Headless identity and user management API

As of 29 August 2026, Ory Kratos is free to use. A headless identity server: registration, login, MFA and recovery as APIs, with no UI of its own. Softwr lists it under Cybersecurity. Ory Kratos is made by Ory, available on Linux, Self-hosted.

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Overview

What Ory Kratos does

Ory Kratos is an open-source identity and user management system built as a headless API. It handles registration, login, multi-factor authentication, account recovery, verification and profile management, and deliberately ships no user interface at all. That is the point. Hosted identity providers own the login screen, which constrains branding and flow; Kratos exposes the flows as APIs and leaves the interface entirely to you. It is written in Go, stores no passwords in your application, and is designed to be deployed as infrastructure rather than embedded as a library.

What people use it for

Products needing complete control over the look and flow of authentication
Applications that must not hand user identity data to a third party
Teams building identity as infrastructure across several services

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Ory Kratos.

Headless means you build every screen, which is significant work compared with a hosted login page
More moving parts than a monolithic IAM: Kratos handles identity, and OAuth2 needs Ory Hydra alongside
Documentation assumes real familiarity with identity concepts and is not a gentle introduction
Self-hosting identity carries the security and availability burden that hosted providers absorb

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Ory Kratos

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Ory Kratosvs
Keycloak
Keycloak: A monolithic IAM with an admin console and login pages included, rather than headless APIs
Ory Kratosvs
Auth0
Auth0: Managed identity with hosted screens, removing the build work Kratos requires

Pricing

What Ory Kratos costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Self-hosted

Free

Full identity server
All flows
Community support

Capabilities

Features

Headless API
Every identity flow exposed as an API, with no imposed UI
Self-service flows
Registration, login, recovery, verification and profile updates
Multi-factor authentication
TOTP, WebAuthn and lookup secrets
Pluggable identity schemas
Define your own user model with JSON Schema

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Ory Kratos free?

Yes, open source and free to self-host. Ory Network is a paid managed service.

What does headless mean here?

Kratos provides identity flows as APIs and no user interface. You build the login, registration and recovery screens yourself.

Does Kratos do OAuth2?

No. Kratos handles user identity; OAuth2 and OpenID Connect provider functionality is Ory Hydra, a separate component.

Keep looking

Where to go from Ory Kratos

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Ory Kratos, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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