Thank you for 10,000 Stars!

Florian Forster
Florian Forster

Founder and CEO

Last week marked an incredible milestone for our team and community:

  • We announced Zitadel Version 3
  • 🎉⭐️Zitadel crossed 10,000 stars on GitHub! 🎉⭐️

Achieving 10,000 stars on GitHub is more than just a number to us—it represents the trust, support, and enthusiasm of thousands of developers who believe in our vision for a modern identity platform.

Zitadel is the leading provider of cloud-native identity infrastructure solutions. Its platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools for multi-tenant, authentication, authorization, and user management. Designed for scalability, flexibility, and security, Zitadel empowers organizations to protect their cloud infrastructure and applications across the globe.

Our Journey to the first 10,000 stars

When we first launched Zitadel as an open-source project, we already embarked on a clear mission: to create a secure, scalable, and developer-friendly identity and access management platform that would simplify authentication and identity management for modern applications especially in multi-tenant scenarios. What began as a small team's passion project has blossomed into a thriving ecosystem of contributors, users, and advocates. Our journey hasn't always been straightforward. From our initial commit to reaching our first 100 stars took a lot of dedication and persistence and we fully celebrated our first 1,000 stars as a major achievement, never imagining we'd be here today, announcing this new milestone that puts us among the top open-source identity projects globally.

Community Spotlight

None of this would have been possible without our incredible community. From the developer who fixed that critical bug at 2 AM to the companies that have built their entire identity infrastructure on Zitadel, every contribution has mattered for our ongoing success.

“Zitadel powers our lab initiative by enabling rapid, secure prototyping with its modern, open source identity management platform. Its multi-tenant design and expansive ecosystem make it the ideal partner for testing our next-generation SaaS solutions, positioning itself as a dynamic alternative to traditional giants like Azure Active Directory. Backed by an engaged community and a forward-thinking team, Zitadel not only safeguards our ideas but also accelerates innovation across the board, ensuring that security remains our top priority. There is just no excuses to not using it :-)” Florent Cenedese, Principal Solution Architect

“Zitadel’s domain expertise drives effortless scaling for startups and enterprises. Its event-driven, event-sourced architecture delivers robust scalability, extensibility, reliability, and thorough auditability—supported by a sustainable business model for the free and open source community” Yordis Prieto, Principal Software Engineer

Technical Evolution

Our codebase and architecture has evolved significantly since our initial release. Our platform has transformed into a highly scalable, cloud-native platform that can handle millions of authentication requests while maintaining sub-100ms response times and we see this proven in customer hosting multiple millions of tenants in Zitadel.

Some of the most impactful technical achievements:

  • Transitioning to resources based APIs for easier integration
  • Implementing event sourcing as the basis for robust audit trails and event driven integrations with actions
  • Updating actions into an extensibility framework that allows customer full control over each http request and event
  • Expanding our protocol support beyond OIDC and OAuth2 to include SAML, WebAuthn, SCIM and LDAP
  • Building a comprehensive set of API that developers can even use to build their own login ui

We made all these improvements while maintaining our commitment to security—undergoing regular penetration testing and security audits to ensure we're providing a solution our users can trust with their most sensitive data.

Lessons Learned

Building an open-source project at this scale has taught us valuable lessons:

  • Documentation matters deeply. Some of our most appreciated contributions haven't been code but clear, thorough documentation that makes complex identity concepts accessible.
  • Community feedback is gold. Our best features often came from community suggestions, and our most significant improvements stemmed from user feedback.
  • Balancing innovation with stability is an art. We've learned to maintain a stable core while allowing for experimentation in new features.
  • Security is never "done." We've built security into every aspect of our development process, from design to deployment.
  • Open source is about people, not just code. Building relationships with our contributors and users has been as important as building the product itself.

Looking Forward

Reaching this milestone matters beyond the satisfaction of seeing a big number on GitHub. A developer-first, open-source identity solution is the future; it enables enterprises with a choice. A choice between self-hosted or cloud solution, a choice between open source and commercial offering, and a choice between building and managing a custom-build platform vs. buying one that offers flexibility and control without the burden of engineering efforts.

In the identity space, this achievement puts Zitadel in the top tier of open-source projects—a significant accomplishment for a specialized security tool in a field dominated by much broader infrastructure projects.

While we're taking a moment to celebrate, we're even more excited about what's next in 2025:

  • Performance Optimization: Comprehensive platform-wide performance enhancements that focus on core authentication service response times, API endpoint optimization across new and existing services, enhanced resource management efficiency, and improved system scalability.
  • TypeScript Login with OIDC: A new, highly customizable login interface for our customers, built in with TypeScript and OpenID Connect support. Self-hosting customers will soon be able to use the hosted login option with OIDC.
  • User Schema Management: This feature offers advanced user profile customization enabling granular control over field management permissions between users and administrators.
  • Configurable Caching System: Beta release of flexible caching infrastructure supporting Redis integration for improved object lookup performance.
  • SCIM Integration: This is the implementation of System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol for automated user provisioning, synchronization, and lifecycle management across external systems.
  • Actions Framework v2: This feature offers enhanced extensibility framework supporting custom triggers and executions through API endpoints for advanced workflow customization.
  • User Group Authorization: The implementation of user group management capabilities enable efficient authorization management at scale, expanding beyond individual user permissions.

Our vision remains consistent: to be the most developer-friendly, secure identity platform that grows with your needs from side project to scale-up.

Thank You!

This milestone belongs to everyone who has been part of the Zitadel journey:

  • Our 54 code contributors who have submitted everything from typo fixes to major feature implementations
  • The companies who have sponsored development or provided resources
  • The thousands of developers who have chosen Zitadel for their projects
  • The investors who continue to support Zitadel’s growth and success
  • Everyone who has reported bugs, suggested improvements, or simply spread the word

Join Us As We Build the Future of Identity

If you are not yet part of the Zitadel community, there has never been a better time to join:

Whether you are building a personal project or enterprise-scale software, we are honored to help secure your applications and manage your users' identities.

Here's to the next 10,000 stars and beyond! 🚀

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