Openfort vs Thirdweb
A specialist wallet stack instead of an all-in-one platform. Open-source, modular, and production-ready.
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Why developers pick a specialist over an all-in-one platform
Best-in-class wallets, not a generalist bundle
Thirdweb bundles contracts, wallets, payments, and storage into one platform — convenient to start, but a walled garden as you scale. Openfort focuses entirely on the wallet layer: embedded wallets, native smart accounts, paymasters, session keys, and a policy engine. Use it standalone or alongside the contract tools you already love, like Hardhat, Foundry, or Thirdweb itself.
OpenSigner: open-source, self-hostable key management
Thirdweb's SDKs are open, but its wallet infrastructure is not self-hostable. Openfort's key management, OpenSigner (opensigner.dev), is fully open-source and self-hostable. You can audit the code, fork it, or run it inside your own infrastructure — the most sensitive part of the stack should never be a black box, and you should never be locked into one vendor's cloud.
Native smart accounts with a granular policy engine
Where generalist platforms offer basic gas sponsorship, Openfort treats smart accounts as first-class citizens with an advanced policy engine at the contract and function level. Enforce per-user spend limits, contract allowlists, and session keys for delegated signing — with ERC-4337 and EIP-7702 support, built-in paymasters for gasless transactions, and TEE backend wallets for server-side automation, all out of the box.
“Openfort has been an instrumental piece of technology for our platform. They helped us from integration to auditing the implementation.”
Christian Gascon
CTO @GFAL
Higher is better (normalized to 100%)
*Updated September 2025
Explore other features at Openfort
Find out more about how teams are using Openfort
Embedded wallets
Non-custodial embedded wallets powered by OpenSigner, with full key export and self-hosting options. Read more
Account abstraction
Native ERC-4337 smart accounts with paymasters for gasless transactions, session keys, and batched operations. Read more
Wallet automations
TEE backend wallets for server-side key storage with permissions and automatic transaction execution. Read more
Frequently Asked Questions
Can't find your answer?
Thirdweb is an all-in-one platform that bundles contracts, wallets, payments, and storage. Openfort is a specialist: it focuses on wallet infrastructure with native smart accounts, a granular policy engine, sub-100ms wallet creation, and open-source key management via OpenSigner. Because Openfort is modular, you can pair it with your preferred contract tooling — Hardhat, Foundry, or even Thirdweb contracts — without buying into a single ecosystem.
OpenSigner, the key management system that powers Openfort embedded wallets, is fully open-source and self-hostable at opensigner.dev. You can audit it, fork it, or run it inside your own infrastructure. Thirdweb's SDKs are open, but its wallet infrastructure is not self-hostable — the most sensitive part of the stack stays in their cloud.
Yes. Openfort is modular by design. Use Openfort for wallets, gas sponsorship, and smart accounts while keeping your contracts deployed with Thirdweb, Hardhat, or Foundry. This avoids the "walled garden" effect of running your entire stack on one mega-vendor.
Openfort ships an advanced policy engine that works at the contract and function level — you can enforce rules like "users can only spend 10 USDC per day" or "this session key may only call these functions." Generalist platforms typically offer basic gas-sponsorship rules. Combined with session keys and TEE backend wallets, Openfort gives you fine-grained control over every automated transaction.
Openfort uses transparent, usage-based pricing where an operation is creating a wallet or sending a transaction — you only pay for what you use. Thirdweb relies on a freemium bundle and takes a cut on payments, which can become costly or restrictive as you scale across their services.
Openfort wallet creation is sub-100ms and signing is in the 100–150ms range, with public, reproducible benchmarks at openfort.io/benchmarks. Generalist platforms running everything through managed infrastructure have more variable latency, which matters for consumer wallet UX and agent flows where every extra second compounds.
Yes. You can migrate your wallet infrastructure to Openfort while keeping your contracts where they are. Teams usually switch when they need deeper smart-account customization, a more robust policy engine, or want to reduce dependency on a single platform.