From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth • Hacker News Board

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#31

Post by notbekacru » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #4

> 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…

> 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.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#32

Post by melonpan7 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

If anything I feel like Clerk adoption is becoming the norm in recent years. I started using it about a year ago and found it to have troublesome reliability.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#33

Post by CharlesW » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

dakolli wrote: post #30

The homepage of val.town says "Zapier for know-code engineers".. Is KNOW -code engineer a term?

It's just a play on the phrase "no code".

Maybe you can help me out: I still have no idea what val.town is. I guess it's an alternative to Cloudflare Workers?

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#34

Post by elAhmo » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:26 PM UTC

Using Clerk, quite unhappy with it. No proper RBAC (roles are tied to organizations, not stored on user itself, so you cannot have a concept of global admin or something like that, unless you use metadata for storing arbitrary key value paris), and more than once in the past weeks/months it had a downtime causing the whole app to fail.

Would think twice before using it in the future.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#35

Post by tornikeo » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:29 PM UTC

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#36

Post by dakolli » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:29 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #33

dakolli wrote: post #30

The homepage of val.town says "Zapier for know-code engineers".. Is KNOW -code engineer a term?

It's just a play on the phrase "no code". Maybe you can help me out: I still have no idea what val.town is. I guess it's an alternative to Cloudflare Workers?

That's a good question, I was having a hard time figuring that out myself. They call themselves the "zapier" for developers. In reality it seems kinda like a FaaS but idk. They have a code intelligence product that seems like a FIM autocomplete. Very confusing product suite.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#37

Post by mvkel » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

Start any greenfield project, hand-coded auth takes up 50% of the development time of the entire MVP

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#38

Post by oompydoompy74 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

BetterAuth is users in your own database. So you don’t have to!

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#39

Post by eddythompson80 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

Don't you wanna level up your career to become an architect? You can draw a box, call it "User Management" and slap "Clerk" or some other SaaS on it, and assume it's managed for you. This allows you to shove whatever requirements you want in that magic blackbox as you feel "it doesn't bring value" for you to implement.

Re: From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

#40

Post by normie3000 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:39 PM UTC

tornikeo wrote: post #35

Can someone more intelligent then me tell me why should I offload my postgres users table to some 3rd party provider? Like what is so hard about keeping that table in my VM on hetzner that I have to give it off to someone else? It's not payments, it's just a few fields of data

AuthN is hard and generic, authZ is easy and specific. Offload authN, and keep your users table in your Hetzner.