acme.sh vs authentik
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted reverse proxy & gateways options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare acme.sh with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole mitmproxy Kong Gateway Istio AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish Caddy Docker Proxy Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Compare authentik with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole mitmproxy Kong Gateway Istio Keycloak AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX Ory Hydra DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev SuperTokens flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy ZITADEL CrowdSec Logto Casdoor Ory Kratos Apereo CAS Dex Hanko Pocket ID Kanidm node-oidc-provider Supabase Auth SAML Jackson Authorizer Authgear Rauthy SimpleSAMLphp WSO2 Identity Server Janssen Project Apache Syncope FusionAuth Shibboleth Identity Provider OpenUnison LemonLDAP::NG Ipsilon Gluu Flex Hello Identity Coop
Feature acme.sh authentik Category Reverse Proxy & Gateways Reverse Proxy & Gateways License GPL-3.0 MIT Language Shell Python Setup difficulty Easy Medium Min. RAM 32 MB 1,024 MB Deployment binary, source docker, kubernetes, helm GitHub stars ★ 47,426 ★ 23,666 First released 2016 2020 Replaces Certbot Okta, Auth0
Why pick each one
Choose acme.sh if… Released under the GPL-3.0 license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly Mature project with 47.4k GitHub stars Written in Shell acme.sh details Choose authentik if… Released under the MIT license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Kubernetes-ready with Helm charts available Mature project with 23.7k GitHub stars authentik details
Frequently asked questions Is acme.sh or authentik better? acme.sh is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider authentik if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are acme.sh and authentik free and open-source? Yes. acme.sh is licensed under GPL-3.0 and authentik under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run acme.sh and authentik with Docker? acme.sh: check the project docs for container support. authentik: yes.