Afraid of FreeRADIUS? If worries about support, scalability, and security have you looking for alternatives, FreeRADIUS creator Alan DeKok explains why those fears are unfounded.
After 25+ years maintaining FreeRADIUS since I created it in 1999, I've heard every objection imaginable.
Organisations hesitate and look elsewhere, spending months evaluating alternatives because they're operating on fear due to uncertainty and lack of education.
I'm going to address each of these concerns directly and explain what's actually true.
The FreeRADIUS fears I hear most often
In conversations with potential clients, I see the same pattern repeatedly. Someone reaches out because they need RADIUS authentication. They've discovered FreeRADIUS. It seems promising. But then the doubts creep in.
“There's no support available, is there?”
“Can it really scale to our requirements?”
“What about the legal risks of open source?”
“Surely the quality can't match commercial products?”
“What happens if you disappear?”
Most of these concerns are based on incorrect assumptions about what open source means in an enterprise context.
Fear #1: “There's no support available”
Organisations assume open source means “download and hope for the best.” They imagine posting desperate questions in forums at 2:00 a.m. when authentication fails. They worry about lacking in-house expertise and having nowhere to turn when something breaks.
Why this fear is unfounded: We’ve provided commercial FreeRADIUS support through InkBridge Networks for over 15 years. Our customer retention rate is 95%. Fortune 50 companies rely on our support. ISPs with 10–15 million subscribers trust us with their authentication infrastructure.
We're the only company dedicated specifically to FreeRADIUS development and support. Other vendors (including Red Hat) escalate their FreeRADIUS issues to us. When you buy “FreeRADIUS support” from Red Hat and something goes wrong, who do you think they call?
We've embedded support links throughout the FreeRADIUS documentation. We pay for ads specifically highlighting support availability. It's there. You just need to look.
We offer multiple support tiers depending on your requirements. If you need guaranteed response times, custom development, or help with initial deployment, we do all that.
For smaller deployments, community support may be adequate. For enterprises requiring guaranteed response times and SLAs, commercial support is the way to go.
Fear #2: “It can't scale for our deployment”
Network admins assume that open source can't handle their user volumes. Organisations worry about performance under load. They fear they'll outgrow FreeRADIUS as they expand.
Why this fear is unfounded: We routinely support deployments with 10–20 million users. Multiple national ISPs run FreeRADIUS for 5–15 million concurrent users. Fortune 50 companies authenticate every switch port and Wi-Fi access point worldwide through FreeRADIUS deployments.
FreeRADIUS is written in C, which means minimal computational overhead.
The Nokia RADIUS server is written in Java, which means that it requires enormous amounts of RAM and CPU in comparison to FreeRADIUS. We’ve heard from administrators that the Nokia RADIUS server takes 5-10 minutes JIT compile everything and start running at an acceptable speed. For a critical system, that amount of “warm up” time is unacceptable in my book.
Consider Cisco ISE. In their documentation, Cisco recommends that a medium-sized installation requires 64 cores and 192GB of RAM. We have never recommended anything remotely close to that for comparable workloads. We have many customers that run large networks on cheep, off-the-shelf hardware.
Scalability bottlenecks are almost always the database, not the RADIUS server.
In our tests, FreeRADIUS can easily handle 20,000-40,000 packets per second without breaking a sweat. But RADIUS servers don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to authenticate against a credential database, and perform accounting queries against an accounting database (link to “separate authentication and accounting DB article”). Depending on how well your database is designed, this can result in a significant drop in performance in the overall authentication system. In our experience, authentication speed comes down to database architecture, not RADIUS server capacity.
Equipment vendors test their products against FreeRADIUS before releasing new firmware. Cisco and Microsoft test with FreeRADIUS. Major switch and access point manufacturers all verify FreeRADIUS compatibility.
If the world's largest equipment manufacturers are testing their products against FreeRADIUS, that should tell you something about its enterprise readiness and scale.
Fear #3: “Open source creates legal risks”
Legal teams worry about liability from open-source licensing. Organisations in regulated industries fear compliance issues. There's a perception that paying for software is somehow “safer” legally.
Why this fear is unfounded: License compatibility is straightforward for users who aren't redistributing modified versions. Here's a simple reality check. Ask your legal team this question:
“We reviewed our use case with the software author, who confirmed it's compatible with the GPL licence. What's our legal risk?”
Their answer will be: “Zero, or close enough not to matter.”
Legal risk only exists if you're modifying and reselling FreeRADIUS. That's not what ISPs do. That's not what enterprises do with authentication infrastructure. You're using the software as intended for internal authentication.
If you're an ISP or enterprise using FreeRADIUS internally, you have no more legal risk than you do using Linux. The GPL (General Public Licence) is one of the most widely understood and court-tested licences in existence.
Modifying FreeRADIUS and redistributing it without following licence terms would create risk. But that's an incredibly niche use case that has nothing to do with normal enterprise deployment.
Open source actually reduces your risk compared to commercial software. You have complete access to the code. You can audit it, modify it, or hire someone else to maintain it. You're not dependent on a single vendor's business decisions or product roadmap.
Fear #4: “Open source means lower quality”
Some people think free software must be written by amateurs. There's a belief that paid alternatives must be more professional, that open source represents second- or third-rate quality.
Why this fear is unfounded: Linux runs most of the internet. Amazon, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all run on Linux. If open source represented lower quality, the world's most demanding infrastructure wouldn't depend on it.
FreeRADIUS has successfully outcompeted multiple commercial RADIUS servers. Steel-Belted RADIUS, once the dominant commercial product, is discontinued. Juniper ended development because FreeRADIUS offered better functionality, better performance, and better value.
Here's something that should interest you: Cisco ships FreeRADIUS when ISE doesn't meet customer requirements. We've seen this in multiple projects. A customer has specific needs, Cisco ISE can't handle them, and Cisco's solution is to provide FreeRADIUS.
As I mentioned, every major equipment vendor tests their products against FreeRADIUS. At this point in the industry, if equipment isn't compatible with FreeRADIUS, it's not implementing the RADIUS protocol correctly. FreeRADIUS has effectively become the reference implementation.
We run our code through multiple static analysers. We use multiple protocol fuzzers to continuously test the software. We deliberately attack our own systems to find vulnerabilities. Security is a continuous process.
When compatibility issues arise, we have direct relationships with vendors (25-year relationships in some cases) that let us get past tier 1, 2, and 3 support directly to the engineers who can fix things.
Vendors are more likely to believe us when we report an issue than they are to believe a random network administrator calling their support line. That matters when you need things fixed quickly.
Fear #5: “We'll have no upgrade path or continuity”
What if development stops? What if the maintainer disappears? Commercial vendors promise continuity through support contracts and product roadmaps. Doesn't that provide more certainty?
Why this fear is backwards: Open source actually reduces risk compared to commercial alternatives. You have complete access to the entire codebase.
Even if InkBridge Networks disappeared tomorrow (not likely given the state of our business, but let’s imagine) countless other developers could maintain and support FreeRADIUS. The same cannot be said for proprietary commercial products when vendors go out of business or discontinue product lines.
Try filing a bug report with a commercial vendor. Maybe they'll reply in one to three months. Need a specific feature or fix? It might appear in next year's release. Or it might not, depending on how it fits their product roadmap.
Your priority with commercial vendors is determined by how much you're paying them. If you're not spending $100 million per year on licensing, you're not a priority customer. Your feature requests go into a queue behind organisations spending more money.
Commercial vendors decide end-of-life dates and forced upgrade cycles. You're entirely dependent on their business decisions. When they decide to discontinue a product line - as Juniper did with Steel-Belted RADIUS - you're forced to migrate on their timeline, not yours.
We provide fast, responsive development. Customer needs drive our priorities, not revenue optimisation from forced upgrades. There are no mandatory upgrade cycles designed to extract more licensing fees. You're investing in expertise and implementation, not perpetual licensing.
Some of our clients have been with us for approaching 20 years. That's because the relationship works and the software continues to meet their needs.
When you actually should look for FreeRADIUS alternatives
I want to be honest about this. There are legitimate situations where FreeRADIUS might not be the right fit.
You need fully managed RADIUS-as-a-Service: If you don't want to maintain any infrastructure whatsoever, services provide managed RADIUS. This is a valid choice. The trade-off is ongoing subscription costs versus infrastructure management responsibility. But this is a preference about infrastructure management, not a FreeRADIUS limitation.
You're deeply embedded in a vendor ecosystem: If you've already standardised on Cisco ISE with extensive integrations, significant customisation, and years of accumulated configuration, migration cost might genuinely exceed the benefit of switching. Note carefully: this is vendor lock-in, not a technical limitation of FreeRADIUS.
You need features outside RADIUS scope: RADIUS handles Authentication, Authorisation, and Accounting. If you need a complete network management platform - monitoring, configuration management, log analysis, traffic optimisation - you need additional tools. This applies to all RADIUS servers. In fact, that’s why we developed InkBridgeRADIUS as a product on top of FreeRADIUS.
Telecommunications carrier-grade Diameter requirements: This is a very specific use case for LTE networks and carrier signalling and billing. Standard enterprise and mid-market equipment doesn't support Diameter. If you're asking whether you need Diameter, you don't. If you actually needed Diameter, you'd already know it.
What's not a legitimate reason: Fear of open source. Assumption that commercial must be better. Myths about scalability or support. Worry about security. Our track record speaks for itself on every one of these points.
What you should actually evaluate
Instead of worrying about unfounded fears, evaluate these factors:
Your actual scale requirements: How many authentications per second do you genuinely need? Most organisations vastly overestimate their requirements. We can help you calculate realistic numbers based on your user base and usage patterns.
Your infrastructure management preferences: Do you want to manage infrastructure or pay for managed services? This is separate from the RADIUS server choice. Both options are available with FreeRADIUS. The question is whether you want operational control or prefer to outsource that responsibility.
Total cost of ownership: Don't just look at licensing fees. Calculate support contracts, staff time managing the system, costs of vendor lock-in, and equipment purchasing constraints. For a detailed breakdown of these costs - including the hidden expenses of both DIY implementation and commercial alternatives - read our white paper DIY vs. Done for You: The RADIUS Reality Check.
Security track record: Compare actual security histories, not marketing promises. Review response times for vulnerability fixes. Look at how vendors handle security disclosures. We've written extensively about security-by-design principles that show how FreeRADIUS has evolved to address modern security requirements.
Vendor lock-in implications: How much flexibility do you need for equipment choices? What happens if you need to change vendors in five years? Are you comfortable with a system that pressures you towards a single manufacturer's ecosystem?
We understand that adopting new infrastructure - even when that infrastructure is mature and proven - creates anxiety. We understand that IT directors face pressure to make 'safe' choices. We understand that expensive feels safer than free.
But safe and expensive are not the same thing. And after 25 years, FreeRADIUS has proven to be both safe and cost-effective for the organisations that take the time to evaluate it properly.
Need help?
InkBridge Networks has been at the forefront of network infrastructure for over two decades, tackling complex challenges across various protocols. Our team of seasoned experts has encountered and solved nearly every conceivable network access issue. If you're looking for insights from the architects behind some of the internet's most foundational authentication systems, you can request a quote here.
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