One of the questions we get most often is—"Outseta looks awesome, but do I have to use your authentication tools?" We typically hear this question for one of two reasons:

1) The company has already built authentication for their product.

2) The company is worried about vendor lock-in—they worry about being reliant on another company in order to authenticate users into their product.

The good news is you can use your own authentication solution with Outseta—we want you to proceed with whatever authentication path makes you most comfortable. So what's the difference between using our authentication tools versus your own?

Outseta's sign up and login embeds

The reason to use Outseta's authentication tools is speed to market—we've pre-built this functionality so that you don't need to. It's really table stakes functionality, but it's time consuming to spin this up on your own. Using our sign-up and login embeds allows you to easily integrate these tools with your website, allowing users to select a subscription plan and then authenticate into your product while showing the user the appropriate version of your product based on their subscription.

This quote from Dave Owens, CEO of TapWalk captures this functionality well:

"I’ve been thinking about building a very simple SaaS product... and was dismayed to discover that all the “overhead” was going to be far more work than the actually “product” piece. I assumed there would be some (cheap) product that would let me get up and running quickly with a simple website that let people “pick your plan,” handle the recurring billing, and let the product check to make sure the user had a plan in place before working. But... I didn’t find anything that was good enough or simple enough."

Aside from speed to market, there are a series of other benefits to using our sign up and login tools as well. For example, you'll be able to track login activity for each of your customer directly on their CRM record—this happens automatically. You can also use login activity (or lack thereof) to automatically trigger drip email campaigns like this: https://outseta.wistia.com/medias/kpc3oso1fs. 

In short, that's what our own authentication tools offer.

Using your own authentication

If you have already built an authentication workflow for your product or are simply planning to use another means of authentication aside from Outseta's authentication tools, you can still reap the benefits of the platform. You'll need to obtain an Outseta access token to use our embeds, but instead of getting it by a user authenticating with Outseta, you can obtain one via your backend communicating with our API.

1. Once a user authenticates successfully into your product, your back-end should obtain an Outseta access token for that user using the Outseta API.

2. Return the Outseta access token to your front end, and pass it to the Profile embed by calling the following JavaScript API method:

Outseta.setAccessToken(access_token); 

Where to go from here:

👉 Generate JWT Access Tokens using the Outseta API
👉 Decode and verify Outseta JWT Access Tokens server-side
👉 The JWT access toke and it's decoded payload