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Frontegg eats homegrown for lunch

The low-maintenance alternative to DIY CIAM

Frontegg vs. Homegrown

Homegrown CIAM is free. Just ignore the late nights and PagerDuty alerts.

DIY seems lean—until it isn't

At the earliest stages, building your own identity system can feel like the faster, cheaper path. You create a user database, add a login box, build some authentication flows, and you’re done. But are you? Once you scale, things get complex — really fast. You’ll start needing to do things like onboard users from multiple IdPs, support multiple applications, and federate with a partner’s SSO system. And that’s when you find yourself maintaining identity instead of building your core product.

Security isn’t a side project

Your CIAM layer is your front door — and attackers know it. From brute-force and DDoS protections to safe patching practices and zero-day response, a secure identity system demands specialized knowledge. And it’s not just about threats. Standards like SAML, OIDC, OAuth2, and enterprise IdP integrations evolve constantly, and each one has its own quirks. Without a dedicated solution, you risk agitating both your security and engineering team. With Frontegg’s powerful AI Security Suite, that expertise comes built in.

Delegate with ease

As your company scales, so do the demands on your identity system. You’ll need performance tuning, analytics, audit trails, and contextual policies like step-up auth or passwordless. You’ll need to support multiple customers, each with their unique requirements. With homegrown identity, your engineers will spend a lot of time on time-consuming code for something that’s not their core competency. With Frontegg’s low-code features, product managers, customer success, infosec, and other non-developers can manage the aspects of CIAM that relate to their roles.

Power to the customers

When you build your own CIAM, guess who builds the UI for managing users, orgs, roles, SSO, and team invites? (Spoiler: still you.) On the other hand, Frontegg includes a self-service Admin Portal your customers can use out of the box — with full org management, user roles, SSO config, and audit trails. It’s their dashboard now.

Compare features

Compare features

Frontegg
Homegrown

Authentication

Frontegg: 5 lines of code. Homegrown: 500 lines, 5 engineers, and still no passwordless.

Standard login

No-code customization

HTML from 2014

API customization

May involve curl scripts and hope

Hosted IDP

Time to roll your own metadata parser

M2M authentication

May involve curl scripts and hope

Entitlements

Frontegg: Click to assign roles. Homegrown: Write your own RBAC engine… again… from scratch.

RBAC

ABAC

DIY JSON checks

Subscription-based

Spreadsheet-as-a-service

Feature flags

Hardcoded booleans

Trial management

Not specified

FGA

Custom logic or nothing

B2B capabilities

Frontegg: Tenants, roles, delegation, account hierarchies—done. 
Homegrown: “Let’s just hardcode a second org for now.”

Organization management

Manual mapping, good luck

Hierarchies

Requires extensive scaffolding

Role level organization

Nested permissions recursion

Login per organization

Multi-tenant = multi-headache

User groups

You’re writing it by hand

Security

Frontegg: Compliant by default.
Homegrown: “Wait, do we need to encrypt refresh tokens?”

Risk and fraud engines

Logging is a feature, right?

Security dashboards

grep and guess

Organizational level policies

If you remember to check

Adaptive MFA

That’s a future-you problem

Step up

You’ll Google it eventually

Logs streaming

Bash script + webhook

Enterprise readiness

Frontegg: One config, works. Homegrown: 6 months and one intern later… still debugging SAML.

SSO

Time to roll your own metadata parser

SCIM

Go ahead, try it

Audit logs

Sort of, if you squint

Management & analytics

Frontegg: Built-in dashboards. Homegrown: grep logs, cry, repeat.

User management

SSH-ing into prod doesn’t count

Usage dashboard

Not available

Organizational signals

Not unless you build it

Admin portal

Still on the roadmap

Self-service

Frontegg: Full self-service Admin Portal out of the box. 
Homegrown: “We’ll build the admin UI… in Phase 4.”

User login and signup

OAuth version roulette

Profile management

Still building it

User invitation

Manual database entries

Organization management

Manual mapping, good luck

Audit logs

Sort of, if you squint

SSO & SCIM configuration

Multi-tenant = multi-headache

Security configuration

Future-you problem
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Authentication

Frontegg: 5 lines of code. Homegrown: 500 lines, 5 engineers, and still no passwordless.

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Entitlements

Frontegg: Click to assign roles. Homegrown: Write your own RBAC engine… again… from scratch.

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B2B capabilities

Frontegg: Tenants, roles, delegation, account hierarchies—done. 
Homegrown: “Let’s just hardcode a second org for now.”

icon

Security

Frontegg: Compliant by default.
Homegrown: “Wait, do we need to encrypt refresh tokens?”

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Enterprise readiness

Frontegg: One config, works. Homegrown: 6 months and one intern later… still debugging SAML.

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Management & analytics

Frontegg: Built-in dashboards. Homegrown: grep logs, cry, repeat.

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Self-service

Frontegg: Full self-service Admin Portal out of the box. 
Homegrown: “We’ll build the admin UI… in Phase 4.”

Leading the momentum on G2

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