Which UI do you use?

Custom UI

Pre built UI

intro-architecture

Managed service

Self hosted

There are three components to SuperTokens:

• Frontend SDK: Provides pre built UI, helper functions and / or session management on the frontend.
• Backend SDK:
  • Provides a middleware which exposes all the auth related APIs for your frontend to call. It also handles session management and access control for your APIs.
  • If your tech stack uses a backend framework that is not supported by SuperTokens, you can follow our guide on spinning up a separate server configured with the SuperTokens backend SDK to authenticate requests and issue session tokens.
• SuperTokens core service: This is called by the backend SDK to maintain state in the database. This can either be self hosted using docker or be managed by us if you sign up on supertokens.com

Visit the how SuperTokens works section to learn more.

important

• Unlike other auth providers, the frontend never talks to the SuperTokens core directly. All requests are to the APIs exposed via our backend SDK which then talks to the SuperTokens core.
• If you are using a backend for which we do not have a SDK, you will have to spin up an additional auth service in a language for which we do have a backend SDK (NodeJS, Python or Golang). This auth service would issue a JWT which you can use to talk to your application's backend.

Multi Tenancy

SuperTokens also supports a multi tenant and multi app setup:

• You can use a single SuperTokens core to allow several tenants / customers to login to your app via a method that's specific to them. For example, for B2B use cases, you can allow one customer to login via email password, whereas use Active Directory (enterprise login) for another customer.
• You can use a single SuperTokens core across several independent apps or dev environments (dev, staging, prod etc).

To learn more about these features, visit our multi tenancy recipe docs.