The 2025 State of Homegrown Authentication Report, sponsored by FusionAuth and Cloudelligent, provides the first deep dive into the tech stacks and team dynamics of organizations building their own identity systems. While many teams opt for in-house solutions for better security and customization, the data reveals significant risks, including the fact that 20% of respondents have experienced a security breach.

Key findings from this inaugural study of 144 IT practitioners include:

• Architecture Trends: 67% of teams build their systems from scratch or roll their own auth server rather than using third-party providers.
• The Tech Stack: Java, JavaScript, and C++ remain the top languages, with 72% of teams running auth in containerized or Kubernetes environments.
• Productivity Benchmarks: Passport.js and Spring Security are rated as the top libraries for both long-term maintenance and initial time to value.
• Team Composition: 60% of teams involve senior-level staff, yet only 23% of those contributors are considered identity specialists.
• Infrastructure Preferences: Roughly half of development teams prefer local environments over SaaS tools for building and testing auth-related flows.

Download the full report to compare your own identity infrastructure against your peers and understand the features, protocols, and challenges shaping the future of custom authentication.

Passwords remain one of the biggest security liabilities in modern applications.

Phishing, credential reuse, and human error continue to drive the majority of data breaches—despite stronger password rules and added MFA layers. Passkeys offer a fundamentally more secure approach to authentication by removing passwords entirely.

This whitepaper explains how passkeys work, why they dramatically reduce common attack vectors, and what development and security teams need to know to implement them successfully.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• Why traditional passwords and MFA still fail against modern threats
• How passkeys use public-key cryptography to prevent phishing and credential theft
• The difference between passkeys and password-based authentication
• Real-world examples of passkey adoption from leading platforms
• Best practices and considerations for implementing passkeys

If you’re responsible for protecting user identities while maintaining a seamless login experience, this guide provides a clear roadmap to moving beyond passwords.

Download the whitepaper to learn how passkeys improve security—and how to put them into practice.

Modern applications demand authentication that is secure, flexible, and built for developers.

Yet many CIAM platforms introduce unnecessary complexity, opaque pricing, and architectural constraints that slow teams down and increase risk, especially in regulated environments.

This solution brief explains why thousands of engineering teams trust FusionAuth to power authentication at scale. Designed for full control and deployment flexibility, FusionAuth delivers a modern CIAM platform without vendor lock-in or multi-tenant compromises.

In this brief, you’ll learn:

• Why traditional CIAM platforms limit flexibility, transparency, and security
• How single-tenant architecture improves control, isolation, and compliance
• What developer-first authentication looks like in practice
• How teams migrate faster with minimal disruption and lower engineering effort

Whether you’re building for fintech, healthcare, education, or enterprise SaaS, this guide shows how FusionAuth helps teams deploy authentication their way securely, predictably, and at scale.

Building authentication in-house may seem appealing, but for regulated industries, it often introduces serious risk.

Organizations in banking, healthcare, and other highly regulated sectors face increasing pressure to secure sensitive data while meeting complex compliance requirements. DIY authentication systems can quickly become costly, difficult to scale, and hard to keep compliant as regulations evolve.

This white paper explores the top three risks of managing authentication internally, from security vulnerabilities and compliance gaps to operational strain on development teams, and explains why many organizations are turning to specialized authentication providers instead.

Inside, you’ll learn:

• Why DIY authentication struggles to keep pace with evolving regulations
• How security threats and downtime risks increase with in-house systems
• What to look for when evaluating authentication vendors for regulated environments

Whether you’re reassessing an existing auth stack or planning for growth, this guide will help you understand the risks and make a more informed, future-ready decision.

Download the white paper to see why DIY authentication may be holding your organization back.