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Comment by notbekacru

17 hours 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.

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notbekacru

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billybones  15 hours 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!

  • colinclerk  11 hours ago

    Clerk cofounder here: I hope this isn’t a Clerk stakeholder! It’s definitely misaligned with our culture around not speaking about competitors and instead playing our own game.

cyberax  15 hours 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.

  • mooreds  14 hours ago

    > offline auth on mobile

    Does Better Auth offer this? Or any other auth libraries or solutions? I haven't heard of any, but haven't done an intensive look either.

    I suppose you could do something with a cached JWT or cached password hash (though sending a password hash to a mobile client spooks me).

    I'm in the space and interested in learning more.

    • cyberax  13 hours ago

      We ended up caching the credentials and the JWT refresh token from Clerk, and then manually requesting the access token using the Clerk's sparsely documented frontend API. Except that to do this with Clerk, we needed to fake the cache API and then pluck the token out of the undocumented "__clerk_client_jwt" key.

      This is supported by Better Auth out-of-the box. It doesn't hide these kinds of stuff from you.

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