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Providers

A Provider is an authentication method, a service that is used by authentik to authenticate the user for the associated application. Common Providers are OpenID Connect (OIDC)/OAuth2, LDAP, SAML, a generic proxy provider, and others.

Providers are the "other half" of applications. They typically exist in a 1-to-1 relationship; each application needs a provider and every provider can be used with one application.

You can create a new provider in the Admin interface, or you can use the Create with Provider option to create a new application and its provider at the same time.

Applications can use additional providers to augment the functionality of the main provider. For more information, see Backchannel providers.

When you create certain types of providers, you need to select specific flows to apply to users who access authentik via the provider. To learn more, refer to our default flow documentation.

You can also create a SAML provider by uploading an SP metadata XML file that contains the service provider's configuration data. SAML metadata is used to share configuration information between the Identity Provider (IdP) and the Service Provider (SP). An SP metadata XML file typically contains the SP certificate, the entity ID, the Assertion Consumer Service URL (ACS URL), and a log out URL (SingleLogoutService).

To learn more about each provider type, refer to the documentation for each provider: