A couple of weeks ago, I started hacking on a project to improve GitHub, mostly because I was tired of the current experience (like many others) and no one seemed to be doing much about it.
It’s still very early and pretty ambitious, but I hope you like it. It’s open source as well.
Fair concern but I don’t think Auth.js was ever “truly free,” considering it was supported by many companies (big or small) including someone like Clerk even running ads on the docs site.
We started Better Auth with the vision of making high-quality auth (with simple abstractions, great docs, extensive set of features...) and make it accessible to everyone . It didn’t start as a commercial venture, at first it was a purely oss project I created. The reason it evolved into a commercial venture is that we saw new ways to make owning your auth even more accessible and scalable for companies.
The reason we’re bringing Auth.js under Better Auth is that the Auth.js team is moving on, and we don’t want the project to be abandoned, that would hurt trust in open-source auth as a whole. We’ve already seen that happen at smaller scaller with Lucia. If that weren’t the case, we’d actually benefit from Auth.js being deprecated, since we’re effectively the next most people would go for and we wouldn't have to take this risk and responsibilities.
1. We won’t sunset Auth.js unless we’re confident that anyone currently using it can migrate to Better Auth without any issues, which is quite difficult right now. So we don’t expect to do that anytime soon and chances are we will never require everyone to migrate.
2. The features we offer through plugins don’t exist in NextAuth, so that shouldn’t be a problem. You can use the core library for almost all of NextAuth’s features, and we provide most plugins first-party. Of course, you can choose not to use a plugin, write your own, copy and modify one, or only use the first-party ones we provide. We handle the database so you can own your auth without writing the logic yourself.
3. Auth.js hasn’t been actively maintained for a while. Our main reason for bringing it under Better Auth was to avoid a sudden deprecation, as that would directly harm the open-source auth ecosystem by eroding trust. Something we’ve already seen happen on a smaller scale with Lucia Auth.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think the part about delegating databases to Better Auth relegates it to being only useful for throwaway projects and companies with low quality technical vision, and there is no actively developed alternative that can do any better.
Patches are better than nothing but I am disappointed with the state of auth in JS.
NextAuth has supported delegating your db for years, companies like cal.com, deel.com and many others use that directly (not just for stateless jwt). I don’t really see the difference here, except that we handle more for you. And of course, If you don’t want to delegate your database, you can keep using NextAuth with stateless auth and we plan to add support for that as well.
There are already many companies with lots of users and revenue using Better Auth from simple auth setups to organizations, billing and what not.
If your question is more about whether we should allow database adapters to be written directly by developers (some people ask that) that’s just not realistic at the scale of what we handle. No one is realistically going to write hundreds of queries manually
Sorry for being dismissive - but I think that’s just a failure of imagination.
Does every app using an adapter for Better Auth need to implement every plugin’s many thousands of operations, even if they’re only using basic functionality and a handful of operations?
Auth.js differed in that you could let them handle it if you’re doing your low impact side product, but once you did care you can opt out. You’re telling me that Better Auth knows better what you need than you do, and so giving you the option to opt out would just be too onerous for you to decide if you want to do it or not.
Why couldn’t Better Auth plugins individually declare what they need and let you implement those functions as you need them?
For what it’s worth my company also makes money in a sensitive industry, Auth.js did everything we need regarding authentication (and we just use other things entirely for billing/etc, which arguably is much more modular), and we only had to implement like 8 functions that took a day and has worked since we started a few years ago. Probably would take me an hour or two today thanks to AI.
Honestly I’m fine with Better Auth taking its stance, but basically saying “you should use Better Auth unless you have this one random fad technical issue, why would you need any alternative like Auth.js??” while saying that there will only be security patches; and no real probable alternative I can think of; and that stance is basically a non starter for what I believe to be a large set of use cases, rubbed me wrong.
I’ll take patches over nothing, but that doesn’t invalidate my feeling that auth in JS is in a sorry state and this isn’t making it better as far as my concerns go. Anyway who am I to talk, I’m not going to make an alternative regardless.
> Does every app using an adapter for Better Auth need to implement every plugin’s many thousands of operations, even if they’re only using basic functionality and a handful of operations?
No, and actually if you really really wanna override the core database calls, we have a way to do so. You just need to write a hook or custom plugin to override the `internalAdapter`.
> Auth.js did everything we need regarding authentication
I don’t think this is true. Any sufficiently complex project has had to add a lot of customization and logic on top of NextAuth to make it even somewhat complete. I was one of those people, which is exactly why I started Better Auth.
> auth in JS is in a sorry state
That’s been the case long before we started Better Auth, it’s the reason we built it in the first place. I hope we’ll be able to change that narrative. But I think what we already have is something other ecosystems can only wish for. Some references:
We’ve had early access to it for a while now, we’re already running a lot of performance critical workloads on it and it’s been working wonderfully. Congrats sam and the team on setting a new standard for what highly performant managed Postgres should look like :)
1. Depends on whether you need RLS or not. We're working on improving the Better Auth + Supabase RLS story by collaborating with them, but if you're not relying on RLS for authorization, I’d go with Better Auth. You’ll get more features, and it’ll feel more integrated with your backend rather than your database. Plus, if you ever want to switch database providers you can.
2. Yeah, you’d need to migrate to Better Auth and move your user table to your main schema. We have a migration guide for Supabase.
3. It’s just additional features built on top of the framework, not a 3rd party auth service. You’ll still use the framework, and when you need those features, you can connect it to the infra to enable them.
As I mentioned in the post, our goal is to help developers own their Auth. And now that we’re funded, it’d help us pursue this goal even more aggressively and give people more confidence.
