What I like best about Ory is its modular, composable architecture — Kratos and Oathkeeper run as independent services with no hard dependencies, so we deploy and scale only what we need, unlike monolithic IAM stacks. It's cloud-native and Kubernetes-friendly by design, slotting naturally into our infrastructure and scaling horizontally without surprises. Being open-source with a real self-hosting option (same codebase as Ory Network) gives us full transparency, architectural control, and zero vendor lock-in. We implemented the UI/UX entirely on our own using Ory's headless APIs, so we have full control over the user experience. We haven't used any third-party integrations — Ory covers our identity and access needs on its own. Performance has been solid and fully meets our requirements. Pricing isn't relevant for us since we're running the open-source self-hosted version. We don't use Ory's support or any AI/intelligence features.

What we like best is that Ory gives us a secure, well-designed authentication foundation instead of forcing us to build and maintain a home-made authentication tool. It fits well with our need for custom authentication flows: SSO, MFA/2FA, magic links, account recovery, and identity schemas. From a UI/UX point of view, Ory being headless is useful because we can keep control over the member experience and adapt authentication screens to our product. It also gives us flexibility for web and app flows. Integration-wise, Ory supports the main identity-provider needs we have, including Google, Facebook, Apple, Kratos, Hydra, APIs, SDKs, CLI, and custom identity schemas. Pricing/ROI is also strong for our use case: self-hosting Ory is cheaper than several hosted alternatives we compared, while still giving us a serious authentication platform.

There’s good support whenever an issue comes up. Once it’s integrated, it’s easy to use.