What is our primary use case?
My main use case for FusionAuth is maintaining a highly congruent multi-cloud and enterprise platform. We are currently running a distributed microservice architecture and process high-volume security vulnerability data across AWS and GCP. Because of the sensitive nature of the data, our system requires absolute control over the data and strict deployment isolation. That is why we chose FusionAuth's self-hosted and dedicated deployment models.
I wanted to offload identity management from our core logic to solve two specific challenges: B2B multi-tenancy with strict RBAC and machine-to-machine authentication, since our backend heavily relies on decoupled micro-background workers.
A specific example of how FusionAuth is used day-to-day in my setup is that we have deployed the multi-cloud enterprise platform, where we scan the cloud accounts of our users to handle B2B multi-tenancy for our clients and machine-to-machine authentication for our decoupled microservices. Whenever our background workers scan results through BullMQ, which is our messaging queue, they need to process cross-cloud scan results to our main server backend. We need a highly secure way to authenticate those internal servers, and FusionAuth centrally issues these M2M tokens while handling the strict RBAC policies we define.
What is most valuable?
FusionAuth offers several valuable features that stand out to me: control, development flexibility, deployment flexibility, and extensibility. Unlike competitors, it allows me to host it anywhere. I can deploy locally via Docker or on Kubernetes, so I am using a hybrid approach. Another valuable feature is that there is no cap on scaling. Many CIAM providers use a pricing model that starts cheap and then spikes drastically based on monthly active users, but FusionAuth's pricing does not penalize growth—you pay on feature, not per user.
The deployment flexibility has helped my team from an engineering perspective and directly solves some of our biggest infrastructure challenges. If an enterprise client requires all their auth data to remain within a specific AWS region, we can support that without changing our application code.
FusionAuth has positively impacted my organization by providing significant engineering cost savings. Building and maintaining a secure, compliant authentication system is difficult and requires a dedicated engineering team. This solution helps us with both time savings and cost savings since we are a fast-paced startup. Additionally, it has led to improvement in developer velocity, as when authentication is decoupled, our development teams can ship features significantly faster while meeting strict enterprise compliance.
Regarding specific outcomes or metrics, I can say our developer velocity has nearly doubled, as our engineering focuses more on developing features rather than dedicating resources to authentication systems. In terms of financial impact, there has been a 150% improvement.
What needs improvement?
FusionAuth could improve its UI customization for the admin console and enhance the documentation to make it more user-friendly.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using FusionAuth for around one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Regarding FusionAuth's scalability, the nodes are stateless, and the heavy lifting for session management is handled via JSON web tokens.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support is good, as I have had positive experiences with previous tickets.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not previously use a different solution, as we were searching and FusionAuth was the first one we chose.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was good, as it was easy to set up and the pricing was reasonable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing FusionAuth, I evaluated other options such as Auth0.
What other advice do I have?
Regarding FusionAuth's AI capabilities, I find they are highly focused on governance, identity security, and access control for AI agents. In terms of accuracy and reliability of output, I appreciate that FusionAuth's single tenant architecture means I do not suffer from the noisy neighbor problem, and in terms of accuracy, I find it to be satisfactory. My advice for others looking into FusionAuth is that if you want to save money and increase development speed, I would highly recommend it. I would rate this product an 8 overall.
