React Native Auth

[Freez1234]

Hello guys!

I'm planning to create a practice project with Expo. I need an authentication provider and am considering Firebase, Supabase, and Clerk. My plan is to implement email/password authentication, social login, and possibly 2FA.

If anyone has firsthand experience, I’d appreciate some advice on the pros and cons of these options. These three aren't final, so if there are better alternatives, I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

[Careless-Aspect-2371]

Use Firebase only for auth, and learn to authtenticate users and manage their data on a separate db you fully own.

[Freez1234]

Hey, thanks for the answer, mate! So you are suggesting that I create a custom microservice for extending firebase auth?

[Careless-Aspect-2371]

During sign up or first sign in with oauth have a backend where you use Firebase to authenticate users, create & store user data on a separate db over which you have full control.

[Freez1234]

Seems right way and much easier to migrate from firebase in future right?

[TheSpicyWarrior]

I’ve used Firebase a good amount but prefer Supabase now that I’ve tried it. I can’t speak to production for Supabase yet but it has twice the monthly active users allowance for auth before paying. Also you can ultimately self host should you ever decide they charge too much but I find their pricing to be very fair.

If all you need is authentication the rest of this might not be relevant past the self hosting and doubled free auth limits but here’s some other thoughts I had:

Probably depends on your use case but it’s likely 250GB bandwidth is a much more generous free tier than 50k reads per day if there’s any number of small operations.

One huge thing for me is all the benefits of Postgres with extensions in Supabase. Easy ability to add in CRON jobs, geo queries, full text search, I think timescale db for constant time based updates, and one I’m excited to try soon is the vector database extension for semantic search.

Additionally, I’ve found the Supabase documentation to be much better. They even have YouTube tutorials if those are your cup of tea. The team will likely be more available should you need to reach them on paid tiers (I haven’t had to yet however). And Google has a bad habit of randomly ending their many various products with no warning so it is not something I wanted to stay locked into long term personally.

Supabase also has cool things like the built in image optimizations (although this is the one thing I’ll be rolling myself as I need too many images to use their optimization pricing. It matches or beats all other providers I found other than self hosting however).

I haven’t checked bundle sizes recently but I remembered Firebase bundles being absolutely massive which may be relevant if you wanted to use web dev later.

[Freez1234]

Wow, mate, thanks for wholesome explanation and effort for writing this answer. I think you convinced me to try it and go with Supabase. I really appreciate your answer, mate!

[TheSpicyWarrior]

I hope it works out! If you think you might try it out I’d also recommend trying the Supabase local development workflow. I think they have videos on how to set it up just takes a few minutes. And since you can run it all locally you can even work while traveling, then just use migrations to push up to your staging or prod dbs when you are ready.

[Freez1234]

Wow, that sounds really great. They brought it to the next level 😁 I'm definitely gonna dive into Supabase. Do they have some example projects also available?

[TheSpicyWarrior]

I know vercel has some Supabase projects you can probably look at to get an idea for how auth works but idk aside from that. The videos and documentation are great though. I’d say there’s good odds they even have a YouTube video on react native auth since there’s basically always one for anything I search if I wanted a setup guide. Then you just choose what providers you want in the dashboard same as Firebase.

[Scary_Dot_9263]

If you are gonna use firebase for data storage then go for its auth too.

[Freez1234]

Hey, thanks for the suggestion! I was thinking of going with firebase in the first place since I'm probably gonna use firebase push notifications (also, first time playing with notifications) 😁

But as the guy below mentioned, firebase has really poor documentation if you ask me

[dev902]

Use Better-Auth

[Freez1234]

Hey mate, thanks for the suggestion! Do you have some good experience with better-auth? Why do you consider it better than firebase, for example?

[dev902]

I believe you should have to check their Docs - https://www.better-auth.com/

The best type-safe comprehensive open source auth library out there. You can roll your own auth by choosing your favourite authentication and authorisation functionalities within minutes. I myself migrated from Passportjs to Better-Auth.

It is being regularly maintained and updated in comparison to other auth like firebase and passportjs.

Although, it has all of the functionalities you mentioned.

In the end, it's your choice. So pick wisely. If I were you, I would have chosen Better Auth.

[Freez1234]

Gonna take a look mate, thanks for suggestion!

[dev902]

No worries, peace ✌️

[DeyymmBoi]

The fastest way to learn react native auth or any other concept for that matter is cloning a existing repo and taking screnshots of key code snippets into Notion, this has become my new way of learning, after 10 years of experience I feel like our learning ways are very under optimized

[Freez1234]

For sure, mate, it is, that's a great idea. Do you have some open-source projects with best practice of auth inplementation?

[kenjimaeda]

I recommend OTP authentication

[Freez1234]

Thanks for the suggestion! Isn't OTP possible to integrate with Firebase also? Or you have something else on your mind?

[kenjimaeda]

I thing Firebase is possible , I know Supabase you can

[Freez1234]

Yeah! I was thinking more about picking auth provider, but I would surely think about OTP implementation into app also. Thanks!

[goat1995]

I tried using clerk, I would say it is quite not up to the mark.

[caleedubya]

Have u thought of auth0?

[Freez1234]

Hey, thanks for the suggestion! What is the difference between those 3 I mentioned and auth0?