By default, Now4real authenticates users via social login. The first time a user tries to post a chat message, they are requested to sign in via Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Once signed in, the user identity is remembered across all the websites that use Now4real with social login.

Custom Auth is an optional Now4real Premium feature that gives you full control over the authentication and authorization of your users.

The authentication part of Custom Auth disables social login and lets your system authenticate users directly. This allows you to achieve single sign-on (SSO) very easily. With SSO, when a user signs in to your website, they are automatically signed into the Now4real chat, too (obviously, only for your site).

The authorization part of Custom Auth allows you to define visibility rules and restrict presence detection of Now4real chats and counters, which are publicly visible by default.

It’s quite straightforward to achieve single sign-on with Now4real. Your back-end and the Now4real back-end don’t need to talk to each other directly. In fact, they speak indirectly through signed tokens inserted into your HTML pages, based on the JWT standard.

The Now4real Publisher Dashboard gives you full control over all the aspects of authentication and authorization.

Please check out the official documentation to learn more about Custom Auth and get started quickly.