how is this related to better auth ? In my understanding, keycloak and better auth are fundamentally different. I would compare keycloak more with Ory for example.
vaishnavsm 49 minutes ago [-]
Keycloak and Better Auth aren't as fundamentally different as you may think! Better auth supports authn/z, being an identity _source_, being an identity provider, being an OIDC/SSO provider (so others can login using better auth), rbac, SAML/SCIM, and a ton more. It's actually really powerful! Most folks found better auth as an alternative to next-auth/auth.js - but better auth does a lot more than those.
(some of those features are enterprise only)
59 minutes ago [-]
jzebedee 48 minutes ago [-]
It's a good reminder, because in the auth landscape I wish I had just picked up Keycloak and stuck with it. Commercial auth is a bad value proposition and not the kind of infrastructure where you want to have acquisition churn happening often.
The self-hosted space is another headache. I wasted so much time trying to make smaller self-hosted auth solutions work, since Keycloak has a reputation for being heavyweight.
I looked into the Ory stack extensively trying to actually use it as advertised for self-hosted / open-source auth. It's aggressively gimped and its SSO features are emphatically _not_ open-source and are gated behind licensing, with no way to find out until you're actually running it.
It's also just unfinished. Their "stack" is a lot of cobbled-together Go mixed with incompletely rebranded acquisitions like SAML Jackson (now "Polis"), which they managed to gut so completely it went from a best-in-class OSS library to unusable.
aeneas_ory 36 minutes ago [-]
Probably the first time reading that the Ory stack is unfinished! Sorry you had a frustrating time, but there's 10 years of development and many happy customers + adopters who see it differently! Polis / Boxy still works as before, we didn't gut or take away anything.
Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders".
For Ory, B2B login is a good value differentiator, because it's required by companies selling to other companies meaning they can spend some money on licenses to further develop software.
Ory powers the largest technology providers, and super small solo projects. It's robust, stable, Apache2 licensed. It's the best CIAM tech out there that's free (!!).
In the end, everyone is entitled to their opinion but the "open source can't make money" train is honestly a bottom tier opinion and I'm tired of reading it on HN, probably written by people making $100K+ a year for writing software and using open source daily (without paying a dime).
It's like the people complaining that Wikipedia is collecting too many donations, while they cheer on Apple or Anthropic or whoever raking in billions of dollars.
Somehow, only if it's open source / non profit it's bad to make money. If it's proprietary nobody gives a damn. Says a lot about society.
khurs 20 minutes ago [-]
>Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders".
There is software that is cutting edge and always changing, and those types of products need to be paid for much more than software that is stable.
With a stable product like Auth (which requires only security fixes and minor features), the 'pay per MAU' model employed across Auth companies is unreasonable
A combination of the people and companies using the product for free or selling its support (like RedHat and IBM for KeyCloak) along with an open license allowing it to be offered as a cloud service should be sufficient?
If you want to pay per monthly active user for the rest of your life, up to you.
Vercel have raised multiple rounds, last one was in 2025 and $300m. So we don't know what the VC's are going to demand for revenue targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercel
vaishnavsm 45 minutes ago [-]
I really want to love KeyCloak. I've had really bad experiences with weird uptime bugs and crash loops that kept me from giving it an honest retry over the last couple years.
It also really shows its age, imo. The interface is clunky, roles and groups having overlapping responsibilities is confusing, making custom UIs for it makes me feel ancient, etc.
I really can't complain though. There is simply no alternative that's as open atm. It's also not easy to make one ( I tried :( ).
andrewstuart2 38 minutes ago [-]
Showing its age is also a pretty significant plus, for such a critical part of one's infrastructure. That means it's been beat up on and run through the ringer for a decade plus at this point and had lots of chances to fix CVEs and other bugs. Not to say there won't be more, but being older and time-proven for an IdP is a major positive.
kommunicate 48 minutes ago [-]
Is keycloak still the only real game in town for open source authorization (not authentication; that part is totally fungible)?
vaishnavsm 41 minutes ago [-]
If you're willing to take the pain of setting up an actual authz model, I've found OpenFGA^ to be really nice. We used it to set up some pretty complex authz involving cross-agent/user/org creation and sharing of data. It's not _simple_, but it is effective.
Congrats BetterAuth! It was the system I was considering before I rolled my own auth system around the passwordless concepts of: OPT + Passkeys + Google login. It is quite nice and simple and I've ported it to 3 separate projects now just via LLM:
If you are building a user system with a database already, adding passwordless auth is easy.
quibono 6 minutes ago [-]
On one hand I love how much easier the email + OTP / passkey flow is on the dev side, I find it _very_ frustrating as a user of services. User+password combos are straightforward at least.
nightski 6 minutes ago [-]
Open source isn't really open any more. It's just pre-acquisition. I'm happy to the creators for their payday but honestly just happy I opted out of BetterAuth building my latest product.
bekacru 1 hours ago [-]
Bereket Here
the team at Vercel has been my biggest inspiration and always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth. This would allow us to focus more on what made better-auth great in the first place It hasn't even been 2 years since we started but thank you everyone from the open-source community for helping us make an impact in short amount of time. There is a lot to do to improve on open source auth and im really excited to be back focusing full time on building
oooyay 49 minutes ago [-]
You're saying that BetterAuth will remain 100% free and open source, will continue to be maintained, and unlocked from Vercels ecosystem?
bekacru 12 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, Vercel has already done this before like with Nuxt, Svelte and other. But I also do want to have a better story for auth with all those frameworks and Nextjs as well.
mavelikara 32 minutes ago [-]
You are asking the wrong person.
magnio 1 hours ago [-]
I used Better Auth for my mobile app backend. It works okayish. My biggest complaints are the OpenAPI specification gets little care, as it mainly caters for JS frontend, and breaking changes in patch version are more common than most packages.
mariopt 41 minutes ago [-]
So, it's just a matter of time until they destroy this project in favour of their cloud interests. Such a shame, it is (was) a nice open source project.
ndom91 16 minutes ago [-]
Congrats! Better auth still provides a grade A dev experience, even with all the plugins, integrations, and tons of things they support.
Best of luck over there!
jgeurts 31 minutes ago [-]
Bummed. Vercel is not a great steward of open source. Happy that Bereket got an exit, though.
bstsb 2 hours ago [-]
can Vercel give any assurance that they won’t add a reliance on their closed-source cloud offering for the package? especially given their ownership of next-auth too
i really loved better-auth’s DX but the nature of their database adapters means it’s relatively easy to switch over to another provider/library
Jnr 1 hours ago [-]
From what I remember, next-auth is kind of dead and Better Auth developers have been maintaining security of next-auth for some time now. (or was it Vercel that did the maintaining?)
Better Auth is the go-to solution for many people using Nextjs, so it makes sense that Vercel puts some effort in maintaining it.
I have never had issues running Nextjs in regular containers, it is just a good open source solution, I don't see why it would be any different with Better Auth.
1 hours ago [-]
mooreds 1 hours ago [-]
Congrats to Better Auth. I'm in the auth space and see all kinds of things.
Anything that makes it easier for developers to build secure applications is a win!
agrippanux 1 hours ago [-]
Uggggg I just implemented Better Auth for our new product - time to start looking for backup plans. I used to be a huge Vercel fanboy but everything they have done in the last few years turns into a complicated mess.
Better Auth is great, I use it for all my projects. Congrats to the team!
slig 1 hours ago [-]
Love better-auth, and congrats to the team!
ebeirne 1 hours ago [-]
This is amazing although I would really like for them to explore filling the backend gaps. An acquisition of Trigger.dev or Inngest would be the obvious move and nobody would be surprised. Thoughts?
fnoef 1 hours ago [-]
Ah, here we go again.
Glad I decided to roll my own auth rather then using some library. I had a feeling that eventually they will join Vercel.
notatoad 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, we rolled our own auth as well. Everybody says you shouldn’t, it’s a risk, etc etc.
but to me that’s less risk than our auth getting bought by somebody whose business goals don’t necessarily align with mine.
slig 23 minutes ago [-]
The data lives in your server, everything is yours, if that happens, you just fork or write your own.
Not sure what writing yourself first buys here.
pzo 56 minutes ago [-]
why not instead fork repo just in case but still use better auth until proven wrong? In case they go evil you just build from you forked one. At that point you would still have to either maintain your own auth or better auth fork.
With current AI your agents probably still will be better with maintaining a fork. Auth libs have pretty limited API surfaces comparing to e.g. ui frameworks.
fnoef 44 minutes ago [-]
I prefer to maintain my code, tailored for my need, than maintaining a massive library that has support for every authentication method there is, while trying to be as generic as possible and fit every business.
Raed667 2 hours ago [-]
I was wondering when that would happen, it was meant to be since the beginning
mrcwinn 2 hours ago [-]
I nearly considered using them recently. So glad I dodged the bullet!
ftchd 2 hours ago [-]
Ain't nobody buying Jose, yet
electriclove 2 hours ago [-]
Umm.. so what did you end up using?
mrcwinn 27 minutes ago [-]
Keycloak is excellent.
whalesalad 1 hours ago [-]
Auth is not hard to roll yourself. Crypto: don't do it. Auth? Easy peasy.
mooreds 1 hours ago [-]
Oh man, it really depends(tm). If you are building a small internal app, sure, but you'd often still be better off leveraging a social provider or employee directory.
I work in the auth space (for FusionAuth) and we run into plenty of folks that started out rolling auth themselves. Just username and password right? A bit of hashing, salting and leveraging a built-in crypto library.
But then you need to add account recovery. And then MFA. And then registration. And then progressive registration. And then webhook integration. And then passkeys. And then SAML integration. And the delegated SAML setup. And then and then and then.
You're distracted from your core application by feature requests for your login system.
You have lots of options nowadays. Use a library provided by your framework (Rails, Spring, and Django have them), use a tool like Better Auth, use a third party system like FusionAuth or Auth0. But don't build undifferentiated functionality that impacts your user experience.
PS Of course, where I stand depends on where I sit, but I firmly believe that you should not build an auth system the same way you should not build a database.
whalesalad 33 minutes ago [-]
This is kinda like the ORM vs no-ORM argument. I think that off-the-shelf auth will accelerate your development for sure (like an ORM) but eventually, you are going to feel constrained by the framework/tool you are using. You will need to work around it. You will find that using it 'correctly' results in poor performance, and so you deviate here and there. Pretty soon you tell yourself, "man I should have just used SQL" or "man, I should have just rolled my own auth". At least ~20 years of software dev has taught me this.
For an MVP or a prototype, I think it's okay to use an off-the-shelf tool. For something serious that will have long-term legs, I would do it myself. I hear all of your concerns and arguments and agree there are a lot of footguns. But again, having spent the better part of my adult life using and interfacing with these tools, I have an innate understanding of how to model auth correctly (separate it from the user, separate users from an 'org' or 'team' entity, etc).
You said it though, 'it depends' is really the right answer here.
mooreds 15 minutes ago [-]
That's a great analogy. My only addition would be the nuance of that data modelling is way more flexible than authentication (and this is said as someone who is continually surprised by the business requirements, standards, and complexities of auth). Data modelling, after all, needs to handle the entirety of reality (at least what can be mapped to a computer). So you're more likely to outgrow it.
I've heard plenty of stories of folks moving from homegrown auth to a off-the-shelf solution, but that's because I'm in the off-the-shelf auth space.
It'd be super interesting to hear stories of folks who went the other way, and outgrew their service provider's auth.
sbkis 13 minutes ago [-]
Can you explain what you mean by “separate users from an ‘org’ or ‘team’ entity)?
whalesalad 9 minutes ago [-]
You are building your app with a single user in mind. They can create <thing> (blog posts, photo albums, code repositories, you name it). Eventually you realize, sometimes people are working in teams or groups. Multiple people need to have access to <thing>. So instead of architecting from the get-go that a <thing> is owned by a user (usually with some kind of FK, like an owner_id, or user_id) you want to start by having an abstraction there right out the gate. Things are owned by a team or org, and a user belongs to an org.
This is why a lot of SaaS you use these days will come with a "default project" or "default team" that might just be 1:1 with your own person. But injecting that abstraction layer makes it super easy down to the road to allow other individuals to join or participate in the management of those entities.
sandeepkd 55 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately its a common misconception, it feels easy, however auth is a lot more harder to do it right, specially when it comes to recovery. A simple example, protocol like TOTP (time based OTP) uses the concept of shared secret and almost every implementation stores the secret as it is in their databases
whalesalad 2 minutes ago [-]
I gotta say, this is not a very strong argument for not doing auth yourself.
Rolling auth by yourself is very messy. Storing tokens correctly, rotating and using correct tokens, with correct parameters and so on. Endless footguns.
lackoftactics 40 minutes ago [-]
also the conseqeunces of implementing it badly from scratch don't make sense if you can use battle-tested solution
esafak 20 minutes ago [-]
Authentication or authorization? Why do people keep conflating them?
whalesalad 6 minutes ago [-]
I think it is pretty obvious why they often get conflated. There is substantial overlap between the two. "Who you are" and "what can you access" are tightly related. Of course they do not need to be, but it's not a surprise that in the majority of situations they are.
zuzululu 46 minutes ago [-]
im amused that people are still relying on third party for handling auth when you can roll your own now with LLMs
slig 21 minutes ago [-]
It's not third party, it's a library you use and you store the data. Got tired of it? Write your own, the data is there.
lackoftactics 42 minutes ago [-]
It's one of those things you shouldn't trust LLMs to such an extent; that part should be very solid because the consequences of bad practices are getting to front page of hacker news :)
zuzululu 35 minutes ago [-]
depends what LLM you are using but most frontier models have seen almost every github/doc/best practices its very hard to get something like supabase/lovable type of mess unless you purposely prompt it to be bad without much inner knowledge but even then it is rectifiable with the right prompts
huflungdung 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 17:33:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.keycloak.org
https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/04/11/keycloak-joins-cncf-as-a...
(some of those features are enterprise only)
The self-hosted space is another headache. I wasted so much time trying to make smaller self-hosted auth solutions work, since Keycloak has a reputation for being heavyweight.
I looked into the Ory stack extensively trying to actually use it as advertised for self-hosted / open-source auth. It's aggressively gimped and its SSO features are emphatically _not_ open-source and are gated behind licensing, with no way to find out until you're actually running it.
It's also just unfinished. Their "stack" is a lot of cobbled-together Go mixed with incompletely rebranded acquisitions like SAML Jackson (now "Polis"), which they managed to gut so completely it went from a best-in-class OSS library to unusable.
Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders".
For Ory, B2B login is a good value differentiator, because it's required by companies selling to other companies meaning they can spend some money on licenses to further develop software.
Ory powers the largest technology providers, and super small solo projects. It's robust, stable, Apache2 licensed. It's the best CIAM tech out there that's free (!!).
In the end, everyone is entitled to their opinion but the "open source can't make money" train is honestly a bottom tier opinion and I'm tired of reading it on HN, probably written by people making $100K+ a year for writing software and using open source daily (without paying a dime).
It's like the people complaining that Wikipedia is collecting too many donations, while they cheer on Apple or Anthropic or whoever raking in billions of dollars.
Somehow, only if it's open source / non profit it's bad to make money. If it's proprietary nobody gives a damn. Says a lot about society.
There is software that is cutting edge and always changing, and those types of products need to be paid for much more than software that is stable.
With a stable product like Auth (which requires only security fixes and minor features), the 'pay per MAU' model employed across Auth companies is unreasonable
A combination of the people and companies using the product for free or selling its support (like RedHat and IBM for KeyCloak) along with an open license allowing it to be offered as a cloud service should be sufficient?
If you want to pay per monthly active user for the rest of your life, up to you.
Vercel have raised multiple rounds, last one was in 2025 and $300m. So we don't know what the VC's are going to demand for revenue targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercel
It also really shows its age, imo. The interface is clunky, roles and groups having overlapping responsibilities is confusing, making custom UIs for it makes me feel ancient, etc.
I really can't complain though. There is simply no alternative that's as open atm. It's also not easy to make one ( I tried :( ).
It's Apache 2.0 and a CNCF incubating project.
[^] https://openfga.dev/
https://ben3d.ca/blog/passwordless-login-system
If you are building a user system with a database already, adding passwordless auth is easy.
the team at Vercel has been my biggest inspiration and always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth. This would allow us to focus more on what made better-auth great in the first place It hasn't even been 2 years since we started but thank you everyone from the open-source community for helping us make an impact in short amount of time. There is a lot to do to improve on open source auth and im really excited to be back focusing full time on building
Best of luck over there!
i really loved better-auth’s DX but the nature of their database adapters means it’s relatively easy to switch over to another provider/library
Better Auth is the go-to solution for many people using Nextjs, so it makes sense that Vercel puts some effort in maintaining it.
I have never had issues running Nextjs in regular containers, it is just a good open source solution, I don't see why it would be any different with Better Auth.
Anything that makes it easier for developers to build secure applications is a win!
Glad I decided to roll my own auth rather then using some library. I had a feeling that eventually they will join Vercel.
but to me that’s less risk than our auth getting bought by somebody whose business goals don’t necessarily align with mine.
With current AI your agents probably still will be better with maintaining a fork. Auth libs have pretty limited API surfaces comparing to e.g. ui frameworks.
I work in the auth space (for FusionAuth) and we run into plenty of folks that started out rolling auth themselves. Just username and password right? A bit of hashing, salting and leveraging a built-in crypto library.
But then you need to add account recovery. And then MFA. And then registration. And then progressive registration. And then webhook integration. And then passkeys. And then SAML integration. And the delegated SAML setup. And then and then and then.
You're distracted from your core application by feature requests for your login system.
You have lots of options nowadays. Use a library provided by your framework (Rails, Spring, and Django have them), use a tool like Better Auth, use a third party system like FusionAuth or Auth0. But don't build undifferentiated functionality that impacts your user experience.
PS Of course, where I stand depends on where I sit, but I firmly believe that you should not build an auth system the same way you should not build a database.
For an MVP or a prototype, I think it's okay to use an off-the-shelf tool. For something serious that will have long-term legs, I would do it myself. I hear all of your concerns and arguments and agree there are a lot of footguns. But again, having spent the better part of my adult life using and interfacing with these tools, I have an innate understanding of how to model auth correctly (separate it from the user, separate users from an 'org' or 'team' entity, etc).
You said it though, 'it depends' is really the right answer here.
I've heard plenty of stories of folks moving from homegrown auth to a off-the-shelf solution, but that's because I'm in the off-the-shelf auth space.
It'd be super interesting to hear stories of folks who went the other way, and outgrew their service provider's auth.
This is why a lot of SaaS you use these days will come with a "default project" or "default team" that might just be 1:1 with your own person. But injecting that abstraction layer makes it super easy down to the road to allow other individuals to join or participate in the management of those entities.