Which Auth Service

If you need more than just simple social login, you'll need to choose an auth service. These are services that cost money but handle complete user management. All user emails, phone numbers, passwords, etc are stored in their database. They handle things like password reset, email verification, two factor authentication, and pretty much everything else that's complicated about auth.

Why an auth service

I was going to write a whole section about why you should use a full auth service, but these tweets summarize this pretty well.

https://twitter.com/thdxr/status/1695814589894553923

https://twitter.com/devagrawal09/status/1686978368246280192/photo/1

Which service to use

There are a lot of auth services and I'm not going to take the time to compare them all here. But here's a quick comparison:

• AWS Cognito: Too complicated and not customizable enough
• Octa: Too complicated and only for enterprise
• Auth0: Not terrible, but not great
• Clerk: Good, but their next library is outdated for next.js 14 and 15: https://twitter.com/Meech_Ward/status/1719240117070749760
• Kinde: Looks promising, works really well with modern next.js, cheaper than most of the other options, but still a smaller company so not as many options.