OWIN : Differences with WIF

This causes a lot of confusion and people keep asking me about this so I thought I would create a tabular comparison.

I'm specifically talking about the NuGet Identity components in OWIN.

OWIN (Identity)	WIF
Fully supported with new features being added	Supported – bugs will be fixed. No new features
WS Fed / SAML / OpenID Connect / OAuth	WS Fed
API’s via code	Invoked via ASP.NET event pipeline
JWT token	XML token
“Change Authentication” with Visual Studio 2013 and 2015	FedUtil with Visual Studio 2010 and “Identity and Access Tool” with Visual Studio 2012

You can think of OWIN as MVC and WIF as Forms. Forms are still supported but all the new whizzy features and all the code samples relate to MVC.

It's important to note the neither OWIN nor WIF are protocols - they are the wrappers around the protocols. The protocols underneath both are identical.

Enjoy!