Posted by bundie 6 days ago
I didn't like the fact that it doesn't have a built-in sign-in ui components, but glady https://github.com/daveyplate/better-auth-ui solves it.
> Engida says Better Auth, currently free to use, will focus on improving its core features and launch a paid enterprise infrastructure that plugs into its open source base. This will give developers the flexibility to self-host or opt for Better Auth’s cloud add-ons as needed.
So open-core and cloud hosting, it seems.
Better Auth is mostly focused on the front end.
You could use the two together, although I haven't seen anyone do that.
I have wasted so much time on third-party authentication frameworks like Ory Kratos that I wish we'd just written our own internal auth library. With Kratos we ended up customising it so heavily we could have just written our own. Same goes for ones that provided a frontend such as Keycloak.
Better Auth has nothing to do with front end.
I addressed that here, straight from the article. Basically open-core and hosting.
How does it compare to something mature like keycloak?
And what is the difference to just self-host superbase?
I can't understand why people who aren't Google scale do it any other way. When you're at the point where you need a separate auth service I'd call that good problems to have.
That's why they're gonna monetize by building a cloud service?
An embeddable library is great for one application; simplifies development and deployment. You can have foreign keys directly to user ids. It's the reason Devise or Spring Security are great for single applications
Yet breaking out authentication to a separate service is one of the first things broken out a certain scale. Why?
* single sign-on between applications (if you have more than one)
* eliminate a user data silo (if you have more than one application)
* different security/legal requirements between PII/credentials of users and application data
* a desire to hang multiple applications off of one identity store for data consistency
* separate deployment cadences
(The multiple app case is much stronger for IAM/Workforce, part of why Okta is a 17B company.)
Such a migration can be complex, so if you can see needing any of the above things soon, it can make sense to start with a sep auth server. You don't need to be google scale to get the benefits.
0: https://fusionauth.io/articles/identity-basics/complete-auth...
It also does a bunch of other auth things, like OIDC.
As an aside OpenAuth seems dead. No activity for 2 months.
Is this the core reason that we have a proliferation of packages, arguably doing the same thing, slightly differently, in some ecosystems… We’ve become this impatient?
However, my comment is a larger commentary. Imagine if a scientist went off and did research for 2 months and didn’t provide any updates about what they were doing? Would we assume their project was dead? Or a writer who publishes a short story and says “I will turn this into a 500 page novel.” 2 months later… no novel… must be dead!
Why can’t we, instead, assume that people who work on open source are sometimes taking a break? Why can’t we create more fluidity around software… fork it… try to integrate it later? The git model was literally designed around this, but we’ve instead decided to live in a centralized shithole where only the original author is smart enough to make useful contributions… and when they don’t… for whatever reason, we shit can the project and start from scratch.
Revolving door.
one of the best libraries in the ecosystem. it's basically open-source Clerk without the baggage of needing to trust someone else's security story