End-user UX options for authentication journeys and account management

Advanced Identity Cloud hosted pages provide OOTB UIs for the following:

This is the most straightforward end-user UX option since all the necessary capabilities are readily available.

Hosted pages can be customized with themes. Themes let you adjust layouts and add company logos, headers, and footers. They also let you change the colors of buttons, links, backgrounds, and more. You can create multiple themes in a realm, set the default theme for the realm, and assign specific themes to different end-user journeys.

Hosted pages are useful if you have limited theming needs or want to try new registration or authentication flows without integrating them into an application. The hosted pages UI is designed for web applications and isn’t supported in native applications.

This UX option only lets you use centralized journey flows in your applications, with embedded journey flows not supported. Specifically, Ping Identity does not support embedding hosted pages in HTML frames.

This is the only UX option that supports SAML journey flows that use Advanced Identity Cloud as the IdP.

Learn more in Hosted pages.

The Advanced Identity Cloud/PingAM Login Widget provides an OOTB UI for end-user authentication journeys, such as sign on, registration, and password reset. It doesn’t provide a UI for account management.

The Login Widget is low-code and framework-agnostic. You can initialize the widget with a few lines of code and integrate it into a modern JavaScript application. It doesn’t currently support server-side rendering (SSR), including Node.js.

The Login Widget provides OOTB support for localization, social login, WebAuthn, passkey, device profile, token management, and compliance with WCAG standards. It is highly themeable and customizable with CSS and JavaScript.

Learn more in Advanced Identity Cloud/PingAM Login Widget.

The Ping Orchestration SDKs let you develop your own custom UI for web, Android, or iOS applications. You then integrate it with your Advanced Identity Cloud tenant using the REST API.

The SDKs return the callbacks or collectors that describe each step in a journey, and you render the UI to collect the user’s input. This gives you full control over the behavior, layout, and theming of the UI.

To prototype your custom UI, start with the sample apps in the Ping Orchestration SDKs sample apps repository. The samples are provided as a starting point, and aren’t intended for production use.

The SDKs can use centralized and embedded journey flows. Follow the Android or iOS tutorials to try out journeys.

Learn more in Ping Orchestration SDKs.

The most flexible UX option is to build your own custom UIs and integrate with the Advanced Identity Cloud REST API. However, this is also the most complex and time-consuming UX option, as you need to build everything yourself without any Ping Identity prebuilt components.

In addition, you will also need deep identity implementation experience, including an understanding of how to securely store tokens locally.

Learn more in Advanced Identity Cloud REST API.

Ping Identity also provides the hosted pages UIs as distributable packages, known as the platform login and end-user UIs. You can self-host one or both of the UIs and configure them to use your Advanced Identity Cloud tenant.

This UX option offers flexibility if you want to customize the layout of the UIs or customize the theming beyond what the hosted pages provide. The UIs support web applications but not native applications.

This UX option also lets you use both centralized and embedded journey flows in your applications.

For background information about the platform end-user and login UIs, learn more in Platform UIs.