Hanko

European development teams building GDPR-sensitive web applications often encounter compliance barriers when delegating user credentials to US-hosted authentication services. Hanko packages a WebAuthn-first authentication engine into a self-hosted Go daemon, keeping user credentials, session tokens, and identity records within private infrastructure. Its drop-in web components handle passkey registration, social login, and email verification without locking the application into a proprietary cloud vendor.

Why Hanko instead of Clerk

Clerk provides developer-focused authentication with prebuilt UI elements, but it operates as a proprietary cloud service where every user account, session token, and credential record sits in a third-party multi-tenant database. For teams that prioritize data sovereignty and architectural control, routing every login event through an external cloud creates compliance challenges and vendor dependency. Hanko matches Clerk's quick integration model by providing pre-styled web components and client libraries, but executes on your own servers where records remain in your private network.

The privacy and control advantage is apparent in data ownership and network boundaries. With Clerk, authentication logs and account records live in hosted infrastructure behind proprietary APIs. Hanko writes directly to your self-hosted PostgreSQL or MySQL instance, ensuring full control over schema backups, audit logging, and token verification. In exchange, Hanko requires self-managed operations: teams must maintain their own database instances, configure SMTP relays for transactional verification codes, and manage production reverse proxies.

What it does well

• First-class WebAuthn passkey implementation that defaults to biometric logins and hardware security keys while providing email passcodes as a fallback.
• Drop-in web components that integrate into React, Vue, Svelte, or plain HTML pages with customizable Shadow DOM CSS properties.
• State-driven Flow API that returns structured JSON payloads for each authentication step, making custom frontend interfaces straightforward to build.
• Compact Go backend executable distributed as a lightweight container image with built-in schema migrations for PostgreSQL and MySQL.
• Native session handling and JSON Web Token issuance with dedicated endpoints for verifying claims and executing remote session revocation.