What can I use connectors for?

[dan]

What can I use FusionAuth Connectors for?

[dan]

FusionAuth Connectors are a paid editions feature (though there is a free trial).

Here are the main use cases:

• Authentication while keeping the user in an external system of record. So if you don't want to migrate your user database to FusionAuth, you can let FusionAuth federate. Without connectors you could use OIDC or SAML, but with connectors you create a simple API endpoint. This also lets you present a single login page to different users (employees, customers, vendors), transparently.
• Phased migration of users. If you want to do a big bang migration to FusionAuth, use the Import Users API. If you want to migrate each user as they authenticate, use Connectors.
• Different user datastores for different sets of users. If users are differentiated by an email domain (say, employees, with an email of <name>@bigcorp.com>), you can easily allow them to authenticate against a particular datastore, while no users without that domain will have access to that datastore.

[elliotdickison]

We're considering upgrading for Connectors. One use-case we have is to allow our customers to maintain existing subscription/user stores while using our service, which seems like it falls squarely in the documented use-cases. Another use-case we have is a little less standard though: we'd like to allow users from one of our FusionAuth tenants to login to an application from another of our FusionAuth tenants. Would it be possible to use a connector to point FusionAuth back at itself in order to bridge tenants like this? Or is there some alternative for us to allow Company A's users to access Company B's app with their existing Company A logins (all stored in the same FusionAuth instance)?

[joshua]

@elliotdickison, Tenants are separate ideas in FusionAuth, so I am not sure this is possible (or at the very least would require separate instances of FusionAuth running) but will give it some further consideration and report back if my teammates have any other thoughts.

However, this forum post pops to mind (may not fully relate to your use case).
https://fusionauth.io/community/forum/topic/1031/shared-users?_=1628694110554

Thanks,
Josh

[elliotdickison]

@joshua That actually helps very much, thanks!