Verifying academic affiliation since 2020

UNiDAYS alternative: verify students in your own app

A UNiDAYS alternative that verifies students inside your own product. Studid is a free academic-verification API over university SSO — no marketplace.

Short answer

UNiDAYS is a consumer student-discount network; Studid is a verification API. If you want to verify student or faculty affiliation inside your own product rather than send users to a marketplace, Studid is the developer-friendly alternative.

Read the integration guide

Last updated September 13, 2026

70+
Federations: 6,365
Institutions: None
User data stored: 6 yrs
Verifying academics

Powers verification for teams at

You own the flow

The login happens at the institution and inside your product — no marketplace in between.

A developer API, not a campaign

Two endpoints, no account, no API key, no commercial partnership.

Academically broader

Students, faculty, staff, researchers and alumni — anyone with an institutional login.

What changes with Studid

Criterion	UNiDAYS	Studid
Model	⚠️ Consumer marketplace plus a discount network	✅ A verification API you embed
Who owns the flow	❌ A branded destination outside your product	✅ Your product, your brand
Audience	⚠️ Students are the core audience	✅ Students, faculty, staff, researchers, alumni
Onboarding	⚠️ Commercial partnership	✅ Two REST endpoints, no account
Pricing	⚠️ Partnership terms, not self-serve	✅ Free; fair-use rate limits only
Coverage	✅ A large consumer student audience	⚠️ Academic institutions via eduGAIN (70+ federations)
Data stored	⚠️ Account data held by the network	✅ None
Distribution	✅ Brings offers and an audience	❌ Verifies users you already have

The distribution row is the honest trade-off: UNiDAYS can put your offer in front of its audience, and Studid cannot. If you need a channel, that matters; if you need a gate, it does not.

Verify students inside your own product

Keep the user relationship and the brand: one redirect, one institutional login, one poll. No marketplace in between.

Read the integration guide

The whole integration

You do not install a network SDK. This is the entire surface area:

# 1. Create a verification → returns { id, link }
curl -X POST https://api.studid.io/v2/auth/verification \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"secretToken":"YOUR_TOKEN","redirectUrl":"https://yourapp.com/callback","serviceName":"My App"}'

# 2. Redirect the user to `link`, then poll for the result
curl https://api.studid.io/v2/auth/verification/{id} \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN'

What you give up

No consumer audience. Studid does not bring you students; it verifies the ones you already have.
No discount marketplace. If you want a catalog of offers and a Gen Z marketing channel, UNiDAYS is the right tool.
No document fallback. Studid is SSO-only. When an institution issues only a transient identifier, authIdentifier is null and you rely on entityId for eligibility plus a per-session token for continuity.
No non-academic segments. Military, first responders and similar groups are out of scope.

None of these are defects if your job is verification. They matter only if you also wanted distribution.

Who should choose which

Choose UNiDAYS if:

You want distribution — a marketplace that surfaces your offer to an existing student audience.
Students are your entire audience and faculty, staff or alumni do not matter.
You are happy for verification to happen on a partner's terms and to share account data with the network.
A consumer-facing student brand channel is part of the campaign, not just the gate.

Choose Studid if:

You want to verify inside your own product and keep the user relationship and the brand.
You need faculty, staff, researchers or alumni, not only students.
You want a self-serve API with no partnership negotiation.
You would rather store no identity data and avoid a marketplace in the middle of your funnel.

The full comparison

Why teams look for a UNiDAYS alternative

UNiDAYS is excellent at what it is: a large student audience and a marketplace of brand offers. But if your goal is in-product verification, the network model gets in the way:

It is a destination. Users join and verify through UNiDAYS, not through your product, so you do not own the flow or the relationship.
It is student-centric. Faculty, staff, researchers and alumni are not the core audience.
It is a commercial partnership, not a self-serve API.
Verification happens on its terms — email loop, document upload, SSO or third-party checks — with account data held by the network.

If you just need a reliable answer to "is this person affiliated with a university?", you do not need a discount network to get it.

How a migration looks

UNiDAYS and Studid are not the same kind of product, so "migration" usually means replacing the verification step, not the whole relationship:

Find the gate. Locate the point where your code currently asks UNiDAYS (or an .edu check) whether a user is a student.
Swap in the two calls. Create a verification, redirect the user to the returned link, poll the result, and read entityId plus any authIdentifier. No SDK or account is involved.
Decide what to do with null. When an institution issues only a transient ID, authIdentifier is null; treat entityId as the eligibility signal and bind the result to your own session token.
Keep the offer, drop the intermediary. Because the login happens inside your product, the user sees your brand throughout.

The student discounts use case shows this flow end to end for a gated perk.

How verification differs from audience access

It is worth separating two things a student-discount platform does at once. Audience access is reach: an existing pool of verified students you can market to. Verification is a yes/no answer about one user. UNiDAYS bundles both; Studid provides only the second.

That changes the economics. With a network you pay for reach whether or not you need it, and you inherit its account model and data practices. With a verification API you pay nothing, you reach only the users who already found you, and you stay the merchant of record for the relationship. Teams whose growth comes from their own product usually prefer the second arrangement; teams whose growth depends on distribution usually prefer the first.

Verification without a network: what you take on

Choosing a plain verification API over a network is not only a technical decision. It moves a few responsibilities onto your team, and it is fair to name them:

Offer design. UNiDAYS brings a catalog of brand deals; with Studid you design and run the offer yourself. Verification is the gate, not the campaign.
Acquisition. The network's audience does not come with the API. You reach users through your own product and channels.
Fraud handling. The institution's signed login removes the obvious forgeries, but you still decide how to handle a shared or resold institutional account — usually by relying on the institution's own MFA.
User support. Questions about eligibility land with you, because the relationship is yours. In exchange, so does the customer.

For teams whose growth already comes from their own product, these are not new burdens — they are the parts of the relationship they wanted to keep.

An evaluation checklist. Before moving, confirm:

Do you need distribution, or only a gate?
Does the audience include faculty, staff, researchers or alumni, not just students?
Can you run verification inside your own product without a marketplace step?
What data does the current network hold, and do you need it to stop?
What happens to a user whose institution issues only a transient identifier?

When a network is the better answer

A verification API is not automatically the right choice, and it is worth saying when it is not:

You need reach. If the offer only works when placed in front of a large existing student audience, a network provides something Studid cannot.
You want the offer run for you. Negotiating and operating a catalog of deals is real work; a network does it.
Your audience is purely students. Faculty, staff, researchers and alumni are Studid's advantage; if they are irrelevant, that advantage does not apply.
You are not building a product. If there is no application to embed a login into, a consumer network is the natural home.

In those cases, the honest recommendation is UNiDAYS. Studid is for teams that already have the audience and want to verify it on their own terms. The test is simple: if you can name the users you want to verify, you need a gate; if you need someone to introduce you to them, you need a network.

Verify these claims yourself

Compare coverage on the live network page.
Check the exact free terms on pricing.
Read the source on GitHub.
Run a real login in the live demo.
UNiDAYS claims — its public site is the source for the network model and audience description above.

Methodology: Facts about UNiDAYS here come from its public website as of September 2026. Verify current details before deciding.

Frequently asked questions

Can Studid replace UNiDAYS for student discounts?

For verification, yes; for distribution, no. Studid confirms that a user is affiliated with an academic institution, which is what you need to gate an offer. It does not bring you an audience or a marketplace of discounts — you build the offer and keep the user relationship.

Do users need a separate account?

No. There is no Studid account for you or your users. The user simply signs in at their own institution; Studid returns the result to your app.

Does it work for faculty and staff, not just students?

Yes. Any institutional login — student, faculty, staff, researcher or alumni — can be verified. Whether roles are returned depends on what the institution releases, but entityId always identifies the institution.

How is this different from an .edu email check?

An email domain proves nothing about enrollment and is easy to game. University SSO is signed by the institution itself, so the result is authoritative.

What does it cost?

Nothing. No account, no API key, no credit card, no per-verification fee.

Can we run a student discount without UNiDAYS?

Yes. You build the offer and Studid verifies that the user is affiliated with an academic institution. You keep the customer relationship instead of sharing it with a network.

Does Studid bring us any audience?

No. It verifies the users you already have. If distribution is the goal, a network is the right tool; if verification is the goal, Studid is the lighter one.

Own the flow, not a network membership

Authenticate with a real university or research institute and see the API result immediately — free, no account.

Read the guide