Better Auth is joining Vercel

https://better-auth.com/blog/better-auth-joins-vercel

by sync • 15 days ago

128 89 15 days ago

better-auth.com

mrcwinn2• 15 days ago

I nearly considered using them recently. So glad I dodged the bullet!

ftchd• 15 days ago

Ain't nobody buying Jose, yet

electriclove• 15 days ago

Umm.. so what did you end up using?

bstsb• 15 days ago

can Vercel give any assurance that they won’t add a reliance on their closed-source cloud offering for the package? especially given their ownership of next-auth too

i really loved better-auth’s DX but the nature of their database adapters means it’s relatively easy to switch over to another provider/library

Jnr3• 15 days ago

From what I remember, next-auth is kind of dead and Better Auth developers have been maintaining security of next-auth for some time now. (or was it Vercel that did the maintaining?)

Better Auth is the go-to solution for many people using Nextjs, so it makes sense that Vercel puts some effort in maintaining it.

I have never had issues running Nextjs in regular containers, it is just a good open source solution, I don't see why it would be any different with Better Auth.

Raed667• 15 days ago

I was wondering when that would happen, it was meant to be since the beginning

khurs2• 15 days ago

Reminder - KeyCloak was donated to CNCF so a safe choice

https://www.keycloak.org

https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/04/11/keycloak-joins-cncf-as-a...

nvegater• 15 days ago

how is this related to better auth ? In my understanding, keycloak and better auth are fundamentally different. I would compare keycloak more with Ory for example.

vaishnavsm3• 15 days ago

Keycloak and Better Auth aren't as fundamentally different as you may think! Better auth supports authn/z, being an identity _source_, being an identity provider, being an OIDC/SSO provider (so others can login using better auth), rbac, SAML/SCIM, and a ton more. It's actually really powerful! Most folks found better auth as an alternative to next-auth/auth.js - but better auth does a lot more than those.

(some of those features are enterprise only)

jzebedee• 15 days ago

It's a good reminder, because in the auth landscape I wish I had just picked up Keycloak and stuck with it. Commercial auth is a bad value proposition and not the kind of infrastructure where you want to have acquisition churn happening often.

The self-hosted space is another headache. I wasted so much time trying to make smaller self-hosted auth solutions work, since Keycloak has a reputation for being heavyweight.

I looked into the Ory stack extensively trying to actually use it as advertised for self-hosted / open-source auth. It's aggressively gimped and its SSO features are emphatically _not_ open-source and are gated behind licensing, with no way to find out until you're actually running it.

It's also just unfinished. Their "stack" is a lot of cobbled-together Go mixed with incompletely rebranded acquisitions like SAML Jackson (now "Polis"), which they managed to gut so completely it went from a best-in-class OSS library to unusable.

kommunicate2• 15 days ago

Is keycloak still the only real game in town for open source authorization (not authentication; that part is totally fungible)?

vaishnavsm3• 15 days ago

If you're willing to take the pain of setting up an actual authz model, I've found OpenFGA^ to be really nice. We used it to set up some pretty complex authz involving cross-agent/user/org creation and sharing of data. It's not _simple_, but it is effective.

It's Apache 2.0 and a CNCF incubating project.

[^] https://openfga.dev/

vaishnavsm3• 15 days ago

I really want to love KeyCloak. I've had really bad experiences with weird uptime bugs and crash loops that kept me from giving it an honest retry over the last couple years.

It also really shows its age, imo. The interface is clunky, roles and groups having overlapping responsibilities is confusing, making custom UIs for it makes me feel ancient, etc.

I really can't complain though. There is simply no alternative that's as open atm. It's also not easy to make one ( I tried :( ).

andrewstuart2• 15 days ago

Showing its age is also a pretty significant plus, for such a critical part of one's infrastructure. That means it's been beat up on and run through the ringer for a decade plus at this point and had lots of chances to fix CVEs and other bugs. Not to say there won't be more, but being older and time-proven for an IdP is a major positive.

andix2• 15 days ago

Keycloak is awesome, but whenever I used it the documentation gave me too little guidance. On how to use it in the right way, without having to customize it too much.

slig3• 15 days ago

Love better-auth, and congrats to the team!

mooreds3• 15 days ago

Congrats to Better Auth. I'm in the auth space and see all kinds of things.

Anything that makes it easier for developers to build secure applications is a win!

huflungdung• 15 days ago

Better auth is an absolute dumpster fire codebase.

whalesalad5• 15 days ago

Auth is not hard to roll yourself. Crypto: don't do it. Auth? Easy peasy.

nicce• 15 days ago

Rolling auth by yourself is very messy. Storing tokens correctly, rotating and using correct tokens, with correct parameters and so on. Endless footguns.

lackoftactics2• 15 days ago

also the conseqeunces of implementing it badly from scratch don't make sense if you can use battle-tested solution

mooreds3• 15 days ago

Oh man, it really depends(tm). If you are building a small internal app, sure, but you'd often still be better off leveraging a social provider or employee directory.

I work in the auth space (for FusionAuth) and we run into plenty of folks that started out rolling auth themselves. Just username and password right? A bit of hashing, salting and leveraging a built-in crypto library.

But then you need to add account recovery. And then MFA. And then registration. And then progressive registration. And then webhook integration. And then passkeys. And then SAML integration. And the delegated SAML setup. And then and then and then.

You're distracted from your core application by feature requests for your login system.

You have lots of options nowadays. Use a library provided by your framework (Rails, Spring, and Django have them), use a tool like Better Auth, use a third party system like FusionAuth or Auth0. But don't build undifferentiated functionality that impacts your user experience.

PS Of course, where I stand depends on where I sit, but I firmly believe that you should not build an auth system the same way you should not build a database.

whalesalad5• 15 days ago

This is kinda like the ORM vs no-ORM argument. I think that off-the-shelf auth will accelerate your development for sure (like an ORM) but eventually, you are going to feel constrained by the framework/tool you are using. You will need to work around it. You will find that using it 'correctly' results in poor performance, and so you deviate here and there. Pretty soon you tell yourself, "man I should have just used SQL" or "man, I should have just rolled my own auth". At least ~20 years of software dev has taught me this.

For an MVP or a prototype, I think it's okay to use an off-the-shelf tool. For something serious that will have long-term legs, I would do it myself. I hear all of your concerns and arguments and agree there are a lot of footguns. But again, having spent the better part of my adult life using and interfacing with these tools, I have an innate understanding of how to model auth correctly (separate it from the user, separate users from an 'org' or 'team' entity, etc).

You said it though, 'it depends' is really the right answer here.

jenius• 15 days ago

I work at Clerk - same opinion here. Rolling your own auth is a trap. It's super easy when you are just getting started with your product and I cannot count how many times I have seen developers boast about how they rolled their own auth and now they aren't "locked in" to a vendor and are saving tons of money etc.

But the truth is, if you scale up as a company, it will end up costing you more in engineering salaries to re-create and maintain all the auth features you will need to support like @mooreds mentioned above than just using an auth library/vendor in the first place. And if you don't scale up, you are unlikely to push outside of the cheap or free tiers of any auth vendor you do go with, so it's a wash. Every reputable auth vendor has a pretty generous free tier.

It feels scary to go this direction because what happens if you blow up and then it becomes ultra expensive and now you're "locked in". All the time I see developers put hundreds of thousands, or millions of MAU into an auth vendor's pricing calc then gawk over the projected monthly bill and decide to roll their own. But the reality is that this doesn't happen. By the time you have that many MAU, you're typically paying out many multiples of that in engineer salaries alone, and paying an auth vendor a fraction of a single engineer's salary to handle your auth is substantially better value than hiring a team to build and maintain your own from scratch.

We have churned our fair share of large company customers over the years, as has every other auth vendor. They have all been because they needed feature we didn't have, not because the price was too high.

sandeepkd2• 15 days ago

Unfortunately its a common misconception, it feels easy, however auth is a lot more harder to do it right, specially when it comes to recovery. A simple example, protocol like TOTP (time based OTP) uses the concept of shared secret and almost every implementation stores the secret as it is in their databases

whalesalad5• 15 days ago

I gotta say, this is not a very strong argument for not doing auth yourself.

djfobbz• 15 days ago

Correct! As a Ruby dev, I started using rodauth and never looked back! https://rodauth.jeremyevans.net/

esafak• 15 days ago

Authentication or authorization? Why do people keep conflating them?

whalesalad5• 15 days ago

I think it is pretty obvious why they often get conflated. There is substantial overlap between the two. "Who you are" and "what can you access" are tightly related. Of course they do not need to be, but it's not a surprise that in the majority of situations they are.

agrippanux• 15 days ago

Uggggg I just implemented Better Auth for our new product - time to start looking for backup plans. I used to be a huge Vercel fanboy but everything they have done in the last few years turns into a complicated mess.

__s• 15 days ago

Silent execution of tremor was a pain in the ass trying to upgrade to nextjs 15 / react 19: https://github.com/tremorlabs/tremor/issues/148

ebeirne• 15 days ago

This is amazing although I would really like for them to explore filling the backend gaps. An acquisition of Trigger.dev or Inngest would be the obvious move and nobody would be surprised. Thoughts?

magnio• 15 days ago

I used Better Auth for my mobile app backend. It works okayish. My biggest complaints are the OpenAPI specification gets little care, as it mainly caters for JS frontend, and breaking changes in patch version are more common than most packages.

fnoef2• 15 days ago

Ah, here we go again.

Glad I decided to roll my own auth rather then using some library. I had a feeling that eventually they will join Vercel.

notatoad2• 15 days ago

Yeah, we rolled our own auth as well. Everybody says you shouldn’t, it’s a risk, etc etc.

but to me that’s less risk than our auth getting bought by somebody whose business goals don’t necessarily align with mine.

pzo• 15 days ago

why not instead fork repo just in case but still use better auth until proven wrong? In case they go evil you just build from you forked one. At that point you would still have to either maintain your own auth or better auth fork.

With current AI your agents probably still will be better with maintaining a fork. Auth libs have pretty limited API surfaces comparing to e.g. ui frameworks.

slig3• 15 days ago

The data lives in your server, everything is yours, if that happens, you just fork or write your own. Not sure what writing yourself first buys here.

xtajv2• 13 days ago

Well... you're not supposed to roll your own cryptography. Like, don't go thinking that you're going to do better than a NIST contest winner if you need a cryptographic primitive.

That goes for protocols as well.

And security-related "build vs. buy" decisions should always include an element of battle-testing. If you have the option to pick an off-the-shelf TLS library rather than implementing your own, both are gonna be full of bugs but at least the former will have already had CVEs filed and fixed. (That's not, btw, an assumption that one likes to write buggy code, but rather, a choice to operate under the assumption that one can always be surprised. Schneier's Law and all).

That said, there comes a point to model your own problem domain, and make sure that your product includes features and components that allow it to meet your information security goals.

I think software engineering has done itself a bit of a disservice by making security seem "scary" (and therefore, something to avoid at all costs) rather than a necessary and boring component of any computer system.

P.S. If anybody wants resources, I'm a big fan of the way that FIPS-199 -> FIPS-200 -> SP 800-53 breaks down security goals, impact levels, and appropriate control measures. You can pick a goal, assess your impact level, and pick something off-the-shelf pretty quickly.

bekacru2• 15 days ago

Bereket Here

the team at Vercel has been my biggest inspiration and always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth. This would allow us to focus more on what made better-auth great in the first place It hasn't even been 2 years since we started but thank you everyone from the open-source community for helping us make an impact in short amount of time. There is a lot to do to improve on open source auth and im really excited to be back focusing full time on building

oooyay• 15 days ago

You're saying that BetterAuth will remain 100% free and open source, will continue to be maintained, and unlocked from Vercels ecosystem?

mavelikara• 15 days ago

You are asking the wrong person.

bekacru2• 15 days ago

Yeah, Vercel has already done this before like with Nuxt, Svelte and other. But I also do want to have a better story for auth with all those frameworks and Nextjs as well.

orliesaurus• 15 days ago

what will be your role at Vercel? Aren't you afraid that you might lose control over the project's future - becoming a cog in a much more complex system?

Aroni• 12 days ago

Hi Bereket,

Congratulations on the acquisition!

We are building auth for developing markets (secure MFA for users without smartphones).

Would love to get your thoughts on the auth landscape.

I'm +254-seven-zero-seven-144992 on WhatsApp.

Cheers!

bhouston2• 15 days ago

Congrats BetterAuth! It was the system I was considering before I rolled my own auth system around the passwordless concepts of: OTP + Passkeys + Google login. It is quite nice and simple and I've ported it to 3 separate projects now just via LLM:

Talk: https://ben3d.ca/blog/passwordless-login-system

Live Demo: https://passwordless.ben3d.ca

Demo Code: https://github.com/bhouston/passwordless

If you are building a user system with a database already, adding passwordless auth is easy.

quibono• 15 days ago

On one hand I love how much easier the email + OTP / passkey flow is on the dev side, I find it _very_ frustrating as a user of services. User+password combos are straightforward at least.

giancarlostoro• 15 days ago

I would rather have keypass and "email me a temp auth link" which then requires 2-factor confirmation. I tire of passwords.

bhouston2• 15 days ago

Passwords are definitely not better than passkeys for login flow as a user, at least not on MacOS / iPhone, etc. I just tap my finger onto the fingerprint reader on my MacBook or I just look at the camera on my iPhone - biometrics for the win.

But you need something as a backup to passkeys so I choose emailed OTP, but it isn't meant to be the primary way to log in.

noveltyaccount• 14 days ago

That demo code looks great -- please add a license :)

zuzululu3• 15 days ago

im amused that people are still relying on third party for handling auth when you can roll your own now with LLMs

lackoftactics2• 15 days ago

It's one of those things you shouldn't trust LLMs to such an extent; that part should be very solid because the consequences of bad practices are getting to front page of hacker news :)

zuzululu3• 15 days ago

depends what LLM you are using but most frontier models have seen almost every github/doc/best practices its very hard to get something like supabase/lovable type of mess unless you purposely prompt it to be bad without much inner knowledge but even then it is rectifiable with the right prompts

slig3• 15 days ago

It's not third party, it's a library you use and you store the data. Got tired of it? Write your own, the data is there.

RichardChu• 15 days ago

Better Auth is great, I use it for all my projects. Congrats to the team!

mariopt• 15 days ago

So, it's just a matter of time until they destroy this project in favour of their cloud interests. Such a shame, it is (was) a nice open source project.

jgeurts• 15 days ago

Bummed. Vercel is not a great steward of open source. Happy that Bereket got an exit, though.

Jnr3• 15 days ago

How so? I am using their open source software, what have I missed?

BoorishBears• 15 days ago

We came full circle!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393382

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45398577

I've said before:

Vercel is not a problem. Pumping millions of dollars into the JS ecosystem through sponsorships and events to define the development landscape in terms of what helps your bottom line... that's bad.
What Rauch is doing is the developer equivalent of private equity squeezing, and what's insane is how well it's working.

mrcwinn2• 15 days ago

Keycloak is excellent.

ndom91• 15 days ago

Congrats! Better auth still provides a grade A dev experience, even with all the plugins, integrations, and tons of things they support.

Best of luck over there!

nightski• 15 days ago

Open source isn't really open any more. It's just pre-acquisition. I'm happy to the creators for their payday but honestly just happy I opted out of BetterAuth building my latest product.

andix2• 15 days ago

Is it about the license? I see less and less new projects using GPL, and a lot of MIT(ish) licenses.

Most complex open source projects like Linux for example have a lot of contributions by corporations. The GPL kind of forces them to participate in open source, instead of just creating internal forks.

GPL and even LGPL are tricky for libraries though.

tough2• 15 days ago

I think it's more about the bait and switch marketing optics of offering a "core" part of your codebase as "FOSS" to get the extra brownie points by doing so, while it's at the same time littered with caveat emptors, and imports from "enterprise licensed" code for the features that business care about.

Also all the "commercial open source" or COSS seems to lean into that, its a valid strategy to monetize open source, but should be done transparently and being very upfront about its bait-y nature to businesses or enterprises imho

hankyone• 15 days ago

Hmmm so Convex support is going to take even more of a backseat I guess

tough2• 15 days ago

so does anything change or will change for better-auth FOSS consumers? Or not really and that mostly depends on what Vercel imposes as new direction going forward? I guess vercel is a good home for foss projects, at worst they'll make first class adoption on their ecosystem without actively hampering others etc

byyll• 15 days ago

Sucks. Now I have to look for alternatives.

yesidoagree• 15 days ago

Worse Auth

Suzie121• 15 days ago

It's not that easy to get back a scammed funds because these scammers are very smart and they will cover their traces but if you manage to find a trustworthy and reliable Recovery company because many scammers are out there disguising as Recovery agents and will only take your money without recovering your funds, I was a victim of such myself after loosing all my funds to cryptocurrency scam. I sort for a help and I met few recovery agents, I was scammed by a particular one again Luckily for me I was referred to these legitimate company and they where able to recover my money back to me. You can as well contact them on RECOVERYDAREK AT gmail DOT com for a help.

customentity• 14 days ago

Congrats to Better Auth !! I can't wait to see what happens next

aitchnyu• 14 days ago

How is BetterAuth in terms of vendor lockin? For a hobby project, I once tried a provider which stored all data within itself and required API calls for every user request. Then I tried Hanko which just authenticates and can be replaced relatively easily (very easily if no passwords IIRC).

FlxMgdnz• 14 days ago

Thanks for mentioning Hanko. Data minimalism is one of our core values, so I’m really happy to see that appreciated.

xtajv2• 13 days ago

It sounds like they just joined Vercel.

Tomy9• 3 days ago

Is rauch planning to control Open source, why are we seeing more acquisitions. Also Is this the time they officially announce the death of Auth.js?

Better Auth is joining Vercel

Related Stories