From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

(blog.val.town)

55 points | by stevekrouse an hour ago ago

10 comments

  • wxw 16 minutes 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 6 minutes 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

  • supermdguy 19 minutes 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.

  • zuzululu 32 minutes 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 27 minutes 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.

      • giancarlostoro 22 minutes 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.

        • rozap 20 minutes ago

          this is sorta the obvious takeaway here. as a postgres/phoenix/elixir enjoyer i am blissfully unaware of all this sort of SaaS churn.

        • Scarbutt 15 minutes ago

          What framework offers all those auth features OOTB?

    • lanyard-textile 21 minutes 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.

  • cyberax 28 minutes 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.