Laravel

Laravel API Authentication: Sanctum vs Passport — Which One Should You Use?

Compare Laravel Sanctum vs Passport: features, OAuth2, SPA auth, complexity, setup code for both, and a decision framework. Choose the right API...

Published 2026-07-06 by Aditya Mandal.

Laravel API Authentication: Sanctum vs Passport — Which One Should You Use? Every Laravel API needs authentication, but choosing how to authenticate is a decision that echoes through your entire codebase. Laravel ships with two first-party packages for API auth — Sanctum and Passport — and the choice between them is one of the most common questions developers face when starting a new project. Pick the wrong one and you'll either drown in OAuth2 complexity you never needed, or hit a wall when your app grows beyond simple token auth. The good news is that the decision is rarely ambiguous once you understand what each package actually does. Sanctum is a lightweight, pragmatic solution for issuing API tokens and authenticating single-page applications with cookies. Passport is a full OAuth2 server implementation for when your application needs to act as an authorization provider that issues scoped tokens to third-party clients. They solve overlapping but distinctly different problems. In this article we'll break down both packages feature by feature, walk through real setup code for each, compare them side by side, and give you a clear decision framework so you can choose with confidence — and avoid the most common mistakes developers make with each. What is Laravel Sanctum? Laravel Sanctum is a featherweight authentication package that ships with Laravel itself. It exists to solve two specific problems without the overhead of a full OAuth2 server: issuing API tokens to users (for mobile apps, CLI tools, or server-to-server calls), and authenticating single-page applications (SPAs) using Laravel's native session cookies. Sanctum does not use OAuth2 at all. A Sanctum API token is simply a long random string stored in a personalaccesstokens database table, linked to a user, a

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