Rich Workflows - Why custom authentication and user management workflows are critical for modern SaaS products.

Authentication is more than just a login box. For modern applications, the moments before, during, and after a user signs in are rich opportunities to create a more secure, personalized, and streamlined experience. This is where custom workflows come in—they are the key to unlocking advanced capabilities without cluttering your core application logic.

This guide explains what custom authentication and user management workflows are, why they’re essential for building sophisticated products, and how you can implement them effectively.

A custom workflow is a sequence of automated steps triggered by a specific event in the user lifecycle, such as user registration, login, or token generation. Think of it as a set of programmable instructions—or business logic—that executes at a critical point in your identity system.

Instead of being limited to a platform’s default behavior, workflows allow you to inject your own logic. This could be anything from validating a user’s password against a list of common passwords to enriching their profile with data from an external service after they sign up.

Most modern authentication platforms that offer workflows do so using an event-driven architecture, often powered by serverless functions or webhooks.

1. Trigger Event: A user action, like creating an account or signing in, fires a trigger.
2. Code Execution: The platform invokes a piece of code you’ve written and hosted, either within the platform itself or on your own infrastructure.
3. Contextual Data: The trigger passes contextual data to your code, such as the user’s email, ID, and other profile details.
4. Business Logic: Your code executes its logic. This might involve calling an external API, performing a calculation, or running a data validation check.
5. Action or Modification: Based on the outcome, your code can halt the process, allow it to continue, or even modify the data before it proceeds to the next step (like adding custom claims to a token).

For example, a “Post User Registration” workflow could be a script that automatically adds every new user to your CRM and assigns them a trial plan.

Workflows are incredibly versatile and can be used to solve a wide range of problems that nearly every SaaS product faces.

• Progressive Profiling: After a user signs up with the basics (email and password), you can use a workflow to check if their email domain matches a known corporate account. If it does, you can automatically associate them with that company in your system.
• External Data Enrichment: When a new user registers, a workflow can call an API like Clearbit or FullContact to enrich their profile with publicly available information like their job title, company size, or social media profiles.
• Custom Password Validation: Go beyond simple complexity rules. A workflow can check a user’s chosen password against a database of known-breached passwords (like Have I Been Pwned) before allowing it to be set.
• Dynamic MFA Enrollment: You can create a workflow that enforces Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for users with an “admin” role but allows a grace period for standard users, giving them a set number of logins before MFA becomes mandatory.
• Integration with Third-Party Systems: Workflows can act as the glue between your identity provider and other tools. You could use a workflow to post a message to a team Slack channel for every new registration or to sync user data with a marketing automation platform.

These examples show how workflows transform authentication from a simple gatekeeper into an intelligent and integrated part of your product’s architecture.

While powerful, building a robust workflow system from scratch comes with significant challenges:

• Complexity and Maintenance: An in-house solution requires building and maintaining an event-driven architecture. This includes handling event queues, ensuring reliable execution, managing retries, and providing observability through logging and monitoring.
• Security Risks: The code in these workflows often handles sensitive user data. It must be executed in a secure environment, with strict controls to prevent data leakage or unauthorized actions. Any vulnerability could compromise your entire user base.
• Scalability and Performance: As your user base grows, your workflow infrastructure must scale with it. A poorly designed system can introduce significant latency into critical user flows like login, creating a poor user experience.
• Developer Experience: A good workflow system needs a great developer experience. This includes clear documentation, easy ways to test and debug code, and a smooth deployment process, often with Git integration.

Kinde provides a powerful and secure workflow engine designed to handle these challenges, allowing you to focus on your product’s unique logic instead of the underlying infrastructure.

With Kinde, you can create custom workflows that trigger at various points in the authentication and user management process. You write your logic in your preferred language, connect your GitHub repository, and Kinde handles the rest—secure execution, scalability, and observability.

For example, you can use Kinde workflows to:

• Add custom claims to tokens: Dynamically add information to access or ID tokens right before they are generated.
• Integrate with anything: Connect to any external API or service to sync user data or trigger external processes.
• Enforce unique business logic: Implement rules that are specific to your business, like custom password policies or MFA grace periods.

By providing a fully managed platform for these workflows, Kinde lets you build the sophisticated, secure, and personalized experiences that modern users expect, without the heavy lifting of building it all yourself.

• About workflows
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