From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

https://blog.val.town/better-auth

by stevekrouse • 3 months ago

304 240 3 months ago

blog.val.town

zuzululu2• 3 months ago

what do you get from Better Auth btw? When I used it last year, I still found it lacking and it seemed to be run by one guy.

azyc• 3 months ago

Lol wut? you get all of your auth data in your own db in 1 cli command. You are not tied to any on db provider. On top of that you get hundreds of auth features like oauth providers (I use it to allow users to log in via google, apple, github) and the best part it's free. Not saying Supabase and Clerk are bad, but they cost money. With better auth you pay exactly $0 for all of this.

giancarlostoro4• 3 months ago

Or I could use a web framework that offers that out of the box, and its free and lives in my database, wherever I want.

lanyard-textile• 3 months ago

It must have come a long way then -- I'm integrating it into a new product and it is absolutely fantastic. It just works.

allthetime2• 3 months ago

I’m setting up a new system (Auth for user facing app, client facing dashboards, internal tool usage, etc.)… it has anonymous app users who can be upgraded to real users upon Auth, organizations, multi-tenant capabilities, all kinda of sign in options… haven’t written a single line of special code this is all handled by included plugins and defaults. It just works and I own all the data.

cyberax4• 3 months ago

Some important context is that Clerk is a major success. They just raised 50 million dollars and they have lots of satisfied users.

And even more users who are looking to escape. Clerk is just a mess. They are trying to cram EVERYTHING into their libraries: Web3 crap, Stripe, etc. Clerk's JS blob is now triggering the browser inspectors for being slow to load.

Every time when we upgraded React, Clerk libraries were the biggest pain with their transitive dependencies. We had issues with Stripe libraries with conflicting versions, etc.

And forget about debugging it. The libraries are obfuscated, and the TS code is impenetrable mess of abstractions to support "isomorphic" code that can run transparently on the frontend and backend.

And their platform itself is lacking important functionality, like freaking audit logs and versioning. Somebody (probably) accidentally changed a setting in their console, and we couldn't trace back when it happened or who did it.

Edit: oh yeah, and don't forget their unreliability. I had to wake up on Sunday to deal with Clerk failing the API calls for token refreshes last week.

notbekacru2• 3 months ago

And even more users who are looking to escape.

Uhm, companies like Replit and several other large startups are actually adopting Clerk. I guess if your world mainly revolves around X (formerly Twitter), it can seem like everyone is moving away from Clerk.

Also, Better Auth’s X presence is pretty much centered around criticizing every auth provider out there, so the discourse there tends to skew heavily negative.

cyberax4• 3 months ago

Clerk looks _really_ good initially. It's perfect if you want to prototype something and not care about auth.

It's only when you start getting into the details that you begin to suffer. For example, there's _still_ no way to do offline auth on mobile. So that your application could be opened if there's no connectivity at the moment. But hey, you can do the Metamask Web3 blockchain thingie!

I have never used Twitter/X, and I don't even have an account there. I'm purely talking about my personal experience and the experience of other companies that I know personally.

Also, Better Auth’s X presence is pretty much centered around criticizing every auth provider out there, so the discourse there tends to skew heavily negative.

They are actually not wrong. Auth is not such a hard task, it's just a lot of drudgery that detracts you from the actual goal of your company. But it's critical functionality that MUST ALWAYS WORK, before all else. And Clerk just fails this test.

I'm switching my company to Logto (it's lightweight and when something breaks, I know how to pick up the pieces), so I don't even have an opinion on Better Auth.

billybones• 3 months ago

Also, Better Auth’s X presence is pretty much centered around criticizing every auth provider out there, so the discourse there tends to skew heavily negative.

This from an account created 2 hours ago, with a username that’s a negation of the BetterAuth founder…

If you’re Clerk stakeholder why not just come out as yourself and engage openly!

cco• 3 months ago

Replit is using Clerk to power their login?

jdwyah• 3 months ago

Man, glad I chose WorkOS instead. I’ve been a happy camper there but have wondered about Clerk bc it felt hotter. Turns out hot isn’t always good.

supermdguy• 3 months ago

Better auth is great! I love how it's way more hackable than using a something like Clerk. We were able to add a plugin to allow auth via iframe postMessage (embedded in a CRM) and everything worked seamlessly.

wxw• 3 months ago

I enjoyed the Supabase migration article from a while ago (https://blog.val.town/blog/migrating-from-supabase) as well. There's a shortage of good, honest writing on long-term engineering decisions, please keep up the blog!

kandros• 3 months ago

Does Better Auth still have the weird design to be everything “request header based”? I remember running admin scripts and tests to be very hacky due to it cause if you skipped that plugins wouldn’t run

moomoo11• 3 months ago

I've just stuck with Auth0 for years now.

Easy to use and high reliability. Some of these other providers are not the best at reliability.

mikelward• 3 months ago

Auth0 breaks password managers. Could you upvote https://community.auth0.com/t/request-addition-to-public-suf....

rbbydotdev2• 3 months ago

Tom's articles are always a good read.

Anyone remember Auth0 and passportjs?

The churn of auth services is never ending, but I suppose so are the standards.

clintonb• 3 months ago

OAuth 2.x and OIDC haven’t changed much. I still use Passport.js with Firebase.

mooreds13• 3 months ago

Disclaimer: I work for an Auth0 competitor, FusionAuth.

Heya, Auth0 is still around! They got bought by Okta in 2021 but still have a free tier and we see them in a lot of bake-offs.

cpursley4• 3 months ago

If you're in Elixir-land, I've put together a few packages to help migrating from Supabase (or other stacks):

- https://github.com/agoodway/introspex (generate Ecto Schemas from postgres tables)

- https://github.com/agoodway/pgrest (Supabase/PostgREST compatible query engine)

I also found this helpful in the migration: https://github.com/supabase-community/supabase-ex

Nothing for auth, I basically did a one-off script for that. Phoenix auth stuff that comes out of the box is great.

cpursley4• 3 months ago

Oh, and http://github.com/agoodway/walex if you need the realtime database change stuff.

bekacru2• 3 months ago

Hey, Bereket from Better Auth here. I started Better Auth to solve this exact issue for myself, and it later turned into a company. It always give me joy to just see others getting the same value from it :) There is a lot to work on, would love to know what we can improve

rbbydotdev2• 3 months ago

Do you think the complexity of auth in the browser, is because browsers don't do enough?

bekacru2• 3 months ago

I think auth is complicated outside of browsers too. But browsers do make some things uniquely confusing, especially cookies and general security primitives are full of footguns

pc86• 3 months ago

Not who you're replying to but browsers do way too much. Load the code you're given and don't do anything else.

mooreds13• 3 months ago

FedCM might be of interest to you. It's one effort to make browsers do more around authentication.

Wrote an article about that here: https://fusionauth.io/articles/authentication/fedcm (hosted at my employer's website)

behailu2• 3 months ago

Hey hey! Qq: you guys plan to support Python backends or is there a way for us to do this?

coreylane• 3 months ago

Works fine with my fastapi backend using the JWT plugin. I run better-auth as a standalone service.

https://better-auth.com/docs/plugins/jwt

WilcoKruijer• 3 months ago

You could almost call the comparison between Clerk and Better Auth unfair. One is a service and one is a library, apples to oranges. Any third-party service integrated into a stack is a liability, libraries as well, but to a lesser degree. It’s about time for more services to be replaced by libraries. Better Auth really shows how to do that imo, it’s a library that integrates on the frontend, backend, and database. This is why it’s so good.

snide• 3 months ago

This is why I'm so thankful I went with Lucia early. They sort of sunset their library and replaced it with documentation (and some small utilities) for how to manage and host authentication for yourself. It's always presented as some big, scary thing you can't manage yourself, but I found that taking the week to learn how security and basic salting works, I was able to feel more confident about how everything worked.

lioeters• 3 months ago

https://lucia-auth.com/

I remember when they deprecated the library and instead made it a learning resource on implementing auth from scratch. Brilliant decision, much respect to the author.

dakolli3• 3 months ago

The homepage of val.town says "Zapier for know-code engineers".. Is KNOW-code engineer a term?

CharlesW• 3 months ago

It's just a play on the phrase "no code".

Maybe you can help me out: I still have no idea what val.town is. I guess it's an alternative to Cloudflare Workers?

dakolli3• 3 months ago

That's a good question, I was having a hard time figuring that out myself. They call themselves the "zapier" for developers. In reality it seems kinda like a FaaS but idk. They have a code intelligence product that seems like a FIM autocomplete. Very confusing product suite.

petemilly3• 3 months ago

Hey, I work at Val Town, and we definitely struggle to describe what it is because the platform is so broad, but I'll try: a javascript code editor in the browser that auto-deploys that code to our servers whenever you edit a file. You can run code by clicking a button, on a cron, via HTTP. And there's other stuff like SQLite and blob storage

So yes, like Cloudflare Workers in some ways. Or like CodePen but fullstack. Or Replit. The val town "founding poem" was:

If GitHub Gists could run,
And AWS Lambda were fun

petemilly3• 3 months ago

This comment thread was a nudge to push out a quick experimental change to the val.town landing page, so thank you. Very open to feedback on that messaging if anyone has any. Most customers these days ask about using val town with claude code, so you could also think of us as a deployment platform for vibe coded apps

melonpan7• 3 months ago

If anything I feel like Clerk adoption is becoming the norm in recent years. I started using it about a year ago and found it to have troublesome reliability.

allthetime2• 3 months ago

Claude, etc. enthusiastically recommend it

elAhmo2• 3 months ago

Using Clerk, quite unhappy with it. No proper RBAC (roles are tied to organizations, not stored on user itself, so you cannot have a concept of global admin or something like that, unless you use metadata for storing arbitrary key value paris), and more than once in the past weeks/months it had a downtime causing the whole app to fail.

Would think twice before using it in the future.

mooreds13• 3 months ago

Disclaimer: I work for a Clerk competitor, FusionAuth.

Can you share your evaluation process? I'm always curious how folks evaluate auth providers.

Did you do a spike? Full POC across a couple of solutions? Rely on a recommendation from a friend? Run through a quickstart and decide it worked and you had bigger problems to solve? Something else?

nateb20222• 3 months ago

Nice website! I like your docs too. Small tip though, the couple obviously AI-written articles (ostensibly for SEO purposes) in your footer are a little of a code smell.

Also design wise, the main logo item (vortex looking thingy) is a tad bit complex, maybe think about a redesign focused on making it more simple/recognizable. The rotating dashes on the landing page hero are a good motif though, so I'd lean into that.

Also noticed that on this page: https://fusionauth.io/tech-papers/winter-2026-g2-fusionauth-... the form under "To get this tech paper complete the form below." doesn't load on Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled. Disabling it causes the form to load though.

pdantix• 3 months ago

i'm currently in the process of evaluating switching our b2b app off clerk too. a customer asked for custom roles (diverging from our default set), which is technically possible on clerk now with role sets, but it's a bit of a workaround rather than first class.

thankfully i'm familiar with better auth from a side project, but migrating SSO/SCIM sounds like it might be a bit of a pain

grinich3• 2 months ago

Custom roles per-org is supported natively with WorkOS. (I'm the founder.)

I think we have the most advanced RBAC system. You can even map roles from custom IdP groups via SCIM.

More info here: https://workos.com/guides/user-provisioning-scim

nateb20222• 3 months ago

You're conflating authentication and authorization.

Clerk is an authentication provider for the most part, it concerns itself with telling you who the user is. Based on that your business logic should be able to determine what they are entitled to do.

They offer a Org/Role based RBAC but since you're doing something different I'd just scrap it entirely and roll your own authorization flow, they have a guide that'll help you get your own started here: https://clerk.com/docs/guides/secure/basic-rbac

elAhmo2• 3 months ago

For the most part is the troubling part :D Ideally there is one vendor that handles this, as a team we don't want to deal with Clerk + something else just for RBAC, so naturally we tried to solve it via Clerk.

Their recommended guide is to pretty much have your own RBAC using key value pairs they offer, which is IMO relatively lazy and most teams come up with this on their own anyway. I wish they offered something that is not prone to someone editing a JSON input manually on their website. You can do basic stuff with it, build tooling around it, but again the fundamental model of only user having a role on the org level has its limitations.

tornikeo2• 3 months ago

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

mvkel2• 3 months ago

Start any greenfield project, hand-coded auth takes up 50% of the development time of the entire MVP

awestroke• 3 months ago

It takes like an hour. So that's a quick mvp then

xmcp1233• 3 months ago

…use Django, install auth modules

jadbox• 3 months ago

I feel seen. It's compounded if you also need to add HIPAA row-level security compliance that spans to every form of resource.

princevegeta893• 3 months ago

I would disagree here. You probably need OAuth with popular social services and implement username, password or OTP-based auth overall. For an MVP, you don't need to care about more details beyond this; it is hardly 10% of the entire effort, if not 5%.

cpursley4• 3 months ago

Mature frameworks generally handle auth out of the box.

oompydoompy742• 3 months ago

BetterAuth is users in your own database. So you don’t have to!

tornikeo2• 3 months ago

Why better auth and not, postgres in docker? What is it better about better auth compared to the ol reliable postgres?

eddythompson80• 3 months ago

Don't you wanna level up your career to become an architect? You can draw a box, call it "User Management" and slap "Clerk" or some other SaaS on it, and assume it's managed for you. This allows you to shove whatever requirements you want in that magic blackbox as you feel "it doesn't bring value" for you to implement.

normie3000• 3 months ago

AuthN is hard and generic, authZ is easy and specific. Offload authN, and keep your users table in your Hetzner.

therealpygon2• 3 months ago

Why pay someone to build a house? I’m sure you could do it yourself…but that doesn’t mean that is the best use of your time in all cases. The analogy is basic but apt; not everyone needs or wants to run (or create) every mechanism. I don’t do all of my own hosting either and it’s not because I couldn’t, it’s that it isn’t worthwhile in my cases.

To expand a bit more: if a business is faced with a choice to save some money by increasing risk, having people who’s job it isn’t managing and supposedly securing that information, or to have a third-party who job is literally to handle and worry about those things, who carries independent insurance, and who is on the hook if they lose customer data, and in exchange the business is simply taking the risk of associating with business that could do a poor job — which of those options sounds more appealing from a business sense? It’s a lot easier to blame someone else than earn back trust for your own major mistakes because you tried to write your own software to save a little money.

That’s the SaaS value proposition.

notatoad• 3 months ago

that doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time in all cases

Okay, so… what are those cases? I’m also curious.

pietz• 3 months ago

This comment is more ridiculous than ever in 2026.

the__alchemist4• 3 months ago

I see Postgres etc as the builder. Supabase is more like the realtor; a middle man extracting profits and complicating the situation.

fnoef• 3 months ago

This is such an absurd take.

For starters, if I'm a "house builder" by trade, then yeah, I am going to build the house myself. Otherwise, why should the client pay me, and not the guy I'm subcontracting?

Secondly, there is no such thing as a "house builder" profession. It consists of a lot of different trades people, some of them having legal power to sign off your house build (for example an electrician). Now, we could try to push for something similar in software engineering, and say require you to have an "authentication engineering certificate" in order to handle code related to auth, and only a person holding the certificate can allow such code for production use. But I'm pretty sure all the vibe coders and tech bros will cry how unfair and bureaucratic the system is.

But of course the entire SWE profession is based on grifting, and extracting as much money as possible from the customers while cutting the costs. If you are so afraid to save passwords to a database, then at least don't call yourself a software engineer.

SkyPuncher4• 3 months ago

It’s just a few fields until it’s not.

SSO, SAML, SCIM, OIDC, OAuth, 2FA, passwordless auth, verification tokens, etc etc, And, variations of each for wildly popular systems you’ll be expected to integrate with but don’t support the exact spec.

For a while at my company, half our support engineers time went to handling random SSO issues that came up in our home built auth system.

jarym• 3 months ago

"home built auth system" is bound to have "random SSO issues". You fix them, that's how things mature.

impulser_• 3 months ago

Majority of apps are B2C apps, they don't need any of this.

All you need is Apple and Google Oauth.

amluto• 3 months ago

Is this perhaps a reason to have a Users table that is separate from the table of data on how you authenticate that user?

sreekanth8503• 3 months ago

I don’t know when we became this lazy. Auth is hard, sure, but putting your users table and sessions behind a vendor API is not something cool. Tell me one feature that is not supported by libraries like OpenIddict (You can build around) or Keycloak?

sebmellen• 3 months ago

Just use Ory Kratos and self host it.

EtienneK• 3 months ago

That’s when you install Keycloak.

faangguyindia• 3 months ago

is it just me? who just uses magic links delivered via email or telegram as backup?

moooo99• 3 months ago

For a while at my company, half our support engineers time went to handling random SSO issues that came up in our home built auth system.

fwiw, we also have entire staff dealing with SSO issues among our employees and users, despite relying on external services to handle auth.

A problem domain as complex as authentication is bound to habe issues of some sort. But I am not sure if I would be so fond of „outsourcing“ something as integral to my services as the access to these services

jarek83• 3 months ago

I must as intelligent as you because I also never understood why things like supabase even exist. I believe this shows how much front-end dev world is detached from how things can simple and secure by default.

dnnddidiej2• 3 months ago

Do you say the same about AWS RDS. Are you saying VMs is all you need and it is a doddle for anyone with FE only experience to set up, maintain and scale.

f3408fh• 3 months ago

Yeah you’re a bit confused. Supabase has nothing to do with frontend other than providing SDKs and some frontend components to integrate with their backend.

pbalau• 3 months ago

You are not supposed to offload your users table, you are supposed to offload your password field.

the__alchemist4• 3 months ago

I am just as confused as you. My 2c: For a broad range of requirements, running your DB directly and managing auth with Django or similar is easier. Perhaps at enterprise scale, this changes.

jonas21• 3 months ago

That's what they did. They migrated to Better Auth, which stores everything in your DB. It's the equivalent of Django auth for the Typescript ecosystem.

il• 3 months ago

People are very scared of messing up authentication and getting hacked. They would rather offload that responsibility to a third party and not think about it.

sandeepkd2• 3 months ago

Unfortunately this is a common premise and on surface its a good idea too to let a expert in particular domain handle it. Where it gets muddy is when this third party are themselves learners and just see this as a good business opportunity

mooreds13• 3 months ago

I wrote an article about this: https://ciamweekly.substack.com/p/ciam-for-the-single-applic...

The tl;dr of the article is that there are auth specific features that are not differentiated but that users expect. Just like you might outsource pieces of functionality like data storage and message sending to specialized servers/libraries/applications, you can do the same with authentication.

The article could use some improvements, tbh, it is 2.5 years old.

giancarlostoro4• 3 months ago

The only project where this was the case that I didn't hate it was at a former employer, and it gave the responsibility of securing users to Auth0 and minimized our PII and attack surface, since even the login page was not hosted or controlled by us. Worse case you somehow hacked our users and got some free entree reward they had, otherwise good luck trying to get very little data.

It allowed us to do SSO for small one-off marketing / campaign focused sites. I could give a specific login URL and it would always log you in if you were already logged on.

rubslopes• 3 months ago

People are afraid to touch dangerous things, like passwords and payment systems. Depending on their skill level, they should indeed be afraid.

sevenzero5• 3 months ago

I roll both of these at work, from auth to cashless payments to regular online payments. It's not as hard as people make it out to be. Probably a lot harder at big companies with huge attack surfaces and attention though.

sudoshred• 3 months ago

Some people enjoy vendor locked managed services for their core infrastructure. Typically this decision is made when building from zero to one in resource constrained environments, and the long term play is to move to your own table/db when it becomes sustainable to do so. The only reason to move to a managed service after having done the work to setup self owned systems is when you need to either a) CYA or b) reduce headcount

cpard• 3 months ago

It feels like a good idea when you are early on in building your product and what matters is quickly iterating on the core features that define your product.

It’s not just the table, it’s also the auth and many other things that you know you will need but you would prefer to focus on other stuff.

Almost always you start by saying that you will replace that when the time comes and you have proved you have a product and now it’s time to actually build the real thing.

Some teams do that and some other, never migrate away and that’s how the GTM of companies like Clerk works.

Viveletta• 3 months ago

I'm working at a tiny non-IT company. Outsourcing this work and the security of not having my non IT trained coworkers being able to touch the server is great (but a VM would do the same ofcourse, while costing money). Most of all, we currently don't even need paid tiers of supabase since our software is so small.

Given, I feel if you run supabase at a big company you are either lazy and probably have too much budget to spend on useless costs.

egorfine2• 3 months ago

Because auth is a productivity tarpit. Anything plan on doing with auth looks simple but almost never is. Homegrown auth can easily sunk half of your dev and support teams.

Of course, we're not talking about email/password with "remember me" checkbox kind of auth.

aatd864• 3 months ago

I wonder if it is not people being notoriously lazy or clueless at an astonishing degree. How often do you hear that password were saved in plaintext? Surprisingly high in this day and age.

People not knowing what salt and pepper is... Vulnerabilities almost as if on purpose...

Perhaps it is actually not THAT hard but just like error handling, people don't want to do the unsexy parts and want to delegate those tasks to someone else perhaps. There must be a behavioral pattern there...

drbscl• 3 months ago

Better Auth is basically just a library / scripts that you run in your application.

BoppreH• 3 months ago

A hard lesson you learn building a complex system is that its reliability is the minimum of the combined reliability of its critical parts.

It's worse than that, the combined availability is the product of all components in the critical path. If your software, the authentication layer, and the cloud provider each have 99% availability, and any one of them can bring your service down, then your final availability is just 97%. With eleven components like that you have zero nines of availability.

That's why reducing components and going for reliable solutions is so important. I'm happy that the team took this path.

gordonhart• 3 months ago

Learned this one the hard way during the last major CloudFlare outage. I don't use them, but their outage bricked my app for hours anyway because the Auth0 public keys used to verify JWTs were served behind CloudFlare, breaking the entire auth chain. Fun!

dzonga• 3 months ago

in rails I just authentication-zero.

no need for 3rd party provider.

nop_slide• 3 months ago

This is what I use, great little library and haven’t touched nor thought about my auth since I set it up.

mooreds13• 3 months ago

Is that the new library that came out in rails 8? Saw someone present on that at RailsConf 2025 and it seemed like a great solution for all rails apps. Hope it leads that ecosystem to get rid of devise (which I always found confusing).

manishsharan• 3 months ago

Has anyone used Keycloak for actual production? I have often thought about it but I stick to Auth0 just because I don't know if Keycloak has a good track record?

dizhn• 3 months ago

For what it's worth Authentik has been listing Cloudflare as a customer for a while. Worth a look. There might be something in their blog.

sudb• 3 months ago

Yes! I used keycloak for multitenant auth and it worked fine - a little dated but functional. Nowadays I'd probably stick to something like Clerk/BetterAuth/Supertokens.

mooreds13• 3 months ago

You might be interested in some of the presentations at KeyConf[0]. You can also get some real world stories from the Reddit[1].

I was at KubeCon EU this year (representing my employer, FusionAuth) and there were lots of folks who were running Keycloak who came and chatted with us.

It's a different set of tradeoffs than Auth0 or other SaaS services. More control, but more responsibility too.

0: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-eu...

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/KeyCloak/

sally_glance• 3 months ago

I've seen it used in production by larger orgs. The scale where you plan for around 6 months of migration, customization and integration of your legacy zoo with 7 different user account DBs. On one hand, all of these projects were successful and now run it in production. On the other, they all really needed the 6 months to whip it into shape.

Edit: Meaning I would use it if you need to get up and running quickly, but it's a solid foundation to build on long-term.

oncensher2• 3 months ago

Had a similar journey recently. Started with Stack Auth, found it unusable in production due to extremely hard rate limits and bad performance even when not rate limited. Switched to WorkOS AuthKit, which works much better and supports useful enterprise features. But inclined to BetterAuth for new projects.

- Syncing external auth provider state with your user state is a bug center. It helps to keep as little state as possible in the auth provider, but there is still some. - Refreshing JWT access tokens every few minutes is another bug center and honestly there is no need to do this if you control your own auth. - WorkOS does not have a complete API. It is built on the assumption that you have one product per billing account and a fixed number of environments (staging, production, and they can give you another one if you ask support). You have to whitelist redirect and other URLs in the dashboard, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way for agents to do it.

Outsourcing auth does not make much sense IMO. The less you can split your state over multiple services the fewer problems you will have. Sometimes it is inevitable, like for payments, or if you need specialized databases for performance reasons. But for auth there is really no good reason if good libraries are available. To people who say that using a service will help you get started faster, none of the problems I hit with auth services had to do with having high scale -- most of them hit before I even launched.

mooreds13• 3 months ago

Outsourcing auth does not make much sense IMO. The less you can split your state over multiple services the fewer problems you will have.

I agree with the general principle. Fewer moving pieces make for more stable applications ("choose boring technology"[0]).

However, I was wondering what you do when you have more than one application that the same userbase wants to access. I can see 3 options:

1. make them register/have credentials for each application (not a great user experience)

2. use a standalone auth server and deal with the increased complexity

3. pick one of your applications to 'own auth' and have the other applications delegate to it. congrats, you've just invented a standalone auth server that is coupled to one of your apps

What am I missing?

0: https://boringtechnology.club/

oncensher2• 3 months ago

I think depending on how much integration you want, either option 1 or treating the multiple applications as a single application that can do multiple things could be good options. Also, option 2 could still avoid having to worry about your auth service going down or rate limiting you. And you could avoid JWT headaches.

Perhaps there is also an option 4, which is option 1 plus a shared user information database for things like Stripe account, profile picture, etc. That is more complex obviously, but it would still solve the issues I had with WorkOS. In particular, I think it would mostly solve "syncing external auth provider state with your user state is a bug center." In particular, the awkwardness around sequencing of account creation and deletion would largely go away because that would be managed as in 1, and the extra shared information would be just that. (But maybe you would want to delete it if the user deletes all their accounts?) And you wouldn't be forced to use webhooks to get updates to shared user state. You could put it in a shared Convex database, for instance, or use some other solution of your choosing.

grinich3• 2 months ago

Hi I'm the founder of WorkOS.

We're working on multi-app support. The large majority of our customers only have 1 app (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, etc.) but this isn't the case for developers building lots of side projects.

Also working on shipping an agent-friendly Dashboard. Stay tuned :)

Would love to hear any more feedback: mg@workos.com

notbekacru2• 3 months ago

When is the Better Auth to WorkOS to Vanilla Auth post coming

smnscu• 3 months ago

I've been through the exact same migration path and I'm so incredibly happy with Better Auth. Good reminder that I should contribute: https://better-auth.com/docs/reference/contributing

ryanhiebert• 3 months ago

My biggest question, that I didn’t see answered, is how the transition comes to an end. If creds aren’t in your system, how well do they transfer? Does it require user involvement? What if they don’t fast enough? What about complex integrations like SSO, SCIM, and passkeys (which are domain scoped)?

wg02• 3 months ago

Never outsource your auth no matter what unless you're vibe coding and it doesn't matter. If that's the case, don't put auth in at all because it's just you anyway or just use vibe coded password lookups from database at that point.

Lastly - here's the law of mother nature:

Software funded by VCs will milk you and will milk you dry. Not now, not tomorrow maybe decade or two later when the hot potato being passed around reaches to the last party holding the bag that now needs its money back with all that others had their 10x returns already taken from them by soldng them at an inflated price to the last party holding the bag.

Clerk's pricing should be evidence enough.

skrtskrt2• 3 months ago

You can literally plug the Better Auth libraries into a little Node server and run it as a separate auth server for free, forever, same as if you used a Django or Rails deployment for that purpose.

That’s all it takes to not use their cloud at all.

wg02• 3 months ago

I'm not talking about open source libraries.

_heimdall• 3 months ago

I'm surprised to see so many top comments here promoting building your own auth. For years I've only heard "never roll your own auth."

small_scombrus• 3 months ago

There are few hard and fast rules, but "never use something that could change as a primary key" and "never roll your own Auth" will always be true

DimmieMan• 3 months ago

I think it's a correction, There's multiple levels of interpretation:

1. Don't roll your own crypto

2. Don't roll your own auth strategy

3. Don't Roll your own auth code

4. Don't host your own auth infrastructure.

For the last few years level 4 has been aggressively pushed with a lot of advertising spend to push people towards prohibitively expensive hosted providers. Donning a tinfoil hat for a moment, auth as a service companies have made everything seem substantially more difficult than it is too for simple needs.

Now we're seeing a correction back to 2 and 3 as people way up the risks of SaaS vs just using a easier to manage local library and discovering it's not as scary as it's been made out to be if you follow now fairly well established patterns.

the providers aren't going anywhere, people still need them for a variety of reasons but their time as the default is ending and whether this is good is to be determined.

jpalomaki• 3 months ago

It’s likely because the quick thought is that auth is just user table with hashed password.

Then when you really start thinking about it, the list of requirements grows.

Of course it’s still totally doable for an average developer, but takes time and mistakes can be catastrophic. And maybe the time is better spent developing stuff that differentiates you from others.

JSR_FDED• 3 months ago

So let me be the one to invite ridicule and scorn by admitting I wrote my own auth code. It was fiddly and boring at the same time. It also wasn’t rocket science, and it works well. I’ll be the first to admit that there are cases where this is a bad idea, I’m just responding to the chants of never roll your own auth.

Knowing every single line of code involved allowed me to add some location-based functionality for one client, provide tailored logging to meet the needs of another client, and my favorite was winning a deal against much bigger competitors by being able to integrate with an absolutely ancient legacy system.

Just like “Goto considered harmful”, DRY, YAGNI, etc - they’re great at making you slow down and think. But they’re not inviolable.

ipnon• 3 months ago

It’s not that crazy! Or hard. If you can store a hashed password in your users table, and keep the salt secret, you have working auth.

SahAssar2• 3 months ago

I'm not discouraging anyone from writing your own auth, but if you have even a little bit higher requirements it becomes more complex. For example I have audited codebases where the TOTP code was enough to get a valid token (without a password, due to a bug), where there was no rate limits on password attempts and one where the password lockout system meant that you could DDoS all admin access trivially, etc, etc. That's even before you need to integrate with a third party via something like OIDC or SAML or SCIM which are probably needed for a product used by businesses these days.

It is hard for serious use-cases. That does not mean you should not do it, but know what tradeoff you are doing in the build-vs-buy equation. Know that this part of your system probably requires more testing, review and expertise than your core product.

skrtskrt2• 3 months ago

Cookie management and CSRF stuff harder to get right, hashing passwords is completely trivial with and library.

And the cookies are not difficult on a technical level, you just have to spend time understanding the threat models and mapping those models correctly onto your own app.

LVB• 3 months ago

And then the client asks for SAML & OIDC support, and codes via SMS, and god knows what else.

gkoz• 3 months ago

If you believe salt has to be kept secret, yeah, don't write your own auth.

j45• 3 months ago

It's not that crazy. It can take time to do and get right, and is time away from other things.

Even if done for fun/learning, it can teach how the details of auth work to better appreciate and understand how other systems work and what to look out for.

I prefer to use existing things if possible, but if it was getting unreasonable to get it how it was needed, it wouldn't be off the table.

dvt• 3 months ago

Kind of funny how something that used to be routinely self-written has been outsourced to libraries. I must’ve written auth like a few dozen times back in the PHP days, not particularly hard or complicated. There’s a million tutorials on how to salt and store passwords. I’ve had my sites attacked many times, but never breached. (JWT, OAuth, etc. has added a ton of surface area, however. So these days it’s inevitably harder to do.)

rozap2• 3 months ago

And now the libraries have been outsourced to saas companies because ???

brabel• 3 months ago

Username and password as the only option to authenticate is really getting obsolete. You need to support social login, passkey, email links, maybe SMS or some other less secure methods depending on your target market… and more often also new standards like verifiable credentials with wallets managing credentials, including logins. Good luck writing your own implementations.

princevegeta893• 3 months ago

I recently worked at a stupid startup where the entire logic of the app was basically delegated to several third-party services out there. It felt like an absolute piece of shit overall. Following the flow of things end-to-end was a nightmare. It was so stupid because the so-called co-founder PM at that company thought it would be cool to keep doing that.

I am with you on this.

Urahandystar• 3 months ago

Thats because the goal of the start-up is to prove they have a viable business not build fancy tech.

benatkin• 3 months ago

I'm actually surprised val.town outsources it. So what you're doing makes sense to me.

MrDarcy• 3 months ago

Recently went with a vendor of an agentic observability and evaluation product built on Supabase and Clerk. The number of vulnerabilities and CVE’s and outright… I don’t even know the words, coming from this stack is staggering.

Be very very wary of any vendor selling something built on this Supabase + Clerk stack. That alone is a very strong indicator they do not understand basic security or data protection.

swyx2• 3 months ago

There is no val associated with this domain

stevekrouse• 3 months ago

back online!

veltas• 3 months ago

A hard lesson you learn building a complex system is that its reliability is the minimum of the combined reliability of its critical parts.

More like "its failures are the total of its critical components' failures" when you've got two nines on your least reliable component so most likely any critical component failure will be exclusive.

jakubriedl• 3 months ago

I've recently switched from Clerk to BetterAuth as well and it's really good and definitely would recommend to anyone. It supports more things I need, it's more reliable, and much cheaper.

The reason why it work for me is that it's finally a open-source solution that is on par or better with commercial. When I've selected Clerk originally the reason was that there wasn't open-source alternative, and I won't roll my own auth, I'm not suicidal. But now? I really don't see a single reason why I would pick Clerk, Auth0, Kinde, ...

sreekanth8503• 3 months ago

I can never imagine putting my user table on a vendor locked cloud provider. And we use Open Iddict.

olegoode• 3 months ago

Super validating, as someone who was recently tempted to use Supabase for a project and decided to give Better Auth a shot instead. It's really made things super simple so far to the point I was semi-worried I'd missed a crucial step. But nope, they just thought of everything.

jillesvangurp• 3 months ago

This sounds like moving the problem, not solving it. I've been doing server based systems since forever and sso is this big complicated topic where people seem to bias to using either really complicated and convoluted enterprise solutions or some walled garden with lots of limitations.

In both cases you are buying into somebody else's solution. That complex framework is complex because the company behind it threw everything and the kitchen sink at it. You don't actually need most of what it needs. And that company makes money by adding more crap to it, via certification, training and consulting. It's complex by design. You can't just sit down and use it. You have to study it first. Become an expert in using it. If you've ever used Keycloak, Spring Security, or similarly convoluted solutions, you know what I'm talking about.

And then that walled garden thing (auth0 or whatever is in fashion these days) is super simple to use. Just do magic steps 1 2 and 3 and you are good to go. But don't deviate from the happy path! There is a happy path. Either you are a perfect match for it or you aren't.

The middle ground is realizing that a users table with a bcrypt encrypted password column and a few other bits and bobs isn't all that hard. Building some sane flows around resetting passwords, 2FA, emailing login links, etc. Easy.

You can actually vibe code most of this stuff these days. And I've done all this manually in the past as well. I've implemented SSO, Oauth (1 & 2), OpenID Connect, etc. I've implemented API call counting, rate limiting, 2FA, etc. I use some frameworks for most of the heavy lifting and dealing with hashing, JWTs, and all the rest. Most of the rest is just simple API plumbing. Most of these flows aren't all that complex. You need good tests and a good understanding of what the system is supposed to do. But that's a constant in this space. Trying to use somebody else's really complicated solution without that is not going to be easier, better, or faster.

arian_• 3 months ago

The auth migration cycle is the startup version of moving apartments. You swear each time will be the last, you lose stuff in the transition, and somehow the new place has the exact same problems as the old one but in different rooms.

raphinou• 3 months ago

I've had good experience with authelia. Simple and light to self host.

swyx2• 3 months ago

And reluctantly I have to hand it to the LLMs here: with the augmentation of the robots, we were able to take the more complex route of supporting both Better Auth and Clerk for a transitional period of two weeks. Every endpoint that handled authentication would accept either kind of cookie, and users slowly moved over to Better Auth because that was the kind of session that the sign-in page provided. Like anything related to security, close reading, rewriting, and testing of all of the code was necessary to make sure we didn't self-own, and the eventual pure-Better Auth auth was handwritten entirely.

just beautiful. nothing to add, clap clap

luodaint• 3 months ago

Notable that in each step, there’s an added abstraction; specifically, an authentication abstraction is the hardest one to reverse.

Using a passwordless login from scratch (magic link + Google OAuth2, sessions stored in Postgres without an external auth vendor) gets us around that altogether. The fears about why one would avoid it are generally not justified. Deliverability is the only true problem. Address that, with a proper provider for transactions, and we’re in boring territory – which is the most delightful kind.

To move from Clerk to Better Auth is logical if the choice is between sovereignty and convenience. It’s the core problem that any group doesn’t want to confront right away: “How much of this am I truly willing to own?”

danborn26• 3 months ago

Better Auth has been a huge time saver for me. Clerk's pricing got a bit out of hand for side projects.

koala-news• 3 months ago

Feels like auth is either “this took 2 hours” or “this consumed half the company for 3 years”, with basically no middle ground.

riffic• 3 months ago

"Better Auth" apparently has nothing to do with "Better Stack" which runs a product called "Better Uptime" and focuses on monitoring or incident response I guess, right?

kreidema• 3 months ago

Been using BetterAuth for half a year/one year now. It's exactly what I always wanted when using Clerk (and its free as a side effect). I was never a fan of the "we'll manage your user Table", always set up the Web hooks to sync everything to my own user table, but still loved the development experience clerk provided (most of it).

I will never go back. Lets see if in 3 years I have a different opinion, but I can't imagine so.

jcmartinezdev• 3 months ago

What's the next stop? it's gotta be auth0

nkmnz2• 3 months ago

For me, the real issue of switching auth providers hasn’t been touched: do thy all use the same hashing functions or how did they move the password hash column across providers? Running them in parallel and rehashing on first login?

anotherevan2• 3 months ago

If the provider is worth its salt¹ it will prefix the stored password with the hash that was used. That way it can update the hash when the user next logs in if it is out of date.

E.g.: {argon2}…

¹ See what I did there?

nkmnz2• 3 months ago

I see what you did there, but I assume you mean "prefix the stored hash with the algorithm that was used", right?

I still don't know how this would help with a migration, though. They would still need to run both auth systems in parallel until every single user has logged in again - or force everyone to create a new password. Right?

joekrill• 3 months ago

Better Auth checked a lot of boxes right out of the gate: high code quality,

Maybe I have high standards, but I absolutely would not describe Better Auth as having "high code quality". It has certainly been improving, but when I first looked at this project it felt really rushed and thrown together, with little automated tests. There's was virtually no logging last I looked, so there's little options to monitor what's happening. I think they've added hooks now so you can "bring your own logging", I guess. And they finally added audit logs but that's only if you use their managed services.

Having said that, I actually use Better Auth, and I'm a huge fan despite those criticisms. I love that it's open source and extendable (there's a free 3rd-party audit logging addon, actually). It's super straight-forward to implement compared with similar products (Ory Kratos, Keycloak, etc). You don't even need a separate DB if you don't want - you can have it create tables in your existing database. And it _is_ improving quickly.

From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

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