First off, full disclosure: I don't work for Clerk; I work for a competitor which offers overlapping functionality, FusionAuth: https://fusionauth.io
I think a sibling comment laid it out well. It's a tradeoff. You are giving up some control over how your users are stored for significant acceleration of functionality. We've had customers say we saved them 1-2 person months of time in initial build, never mind ongoing maintenance.
Would you build an app using a database managed by someone else? Isn't data a crucial asset? Some call it the new oil, I've heard. Yet lots of people choose to use an outsourced database provider. Auth is more user facing than a database, but if you can get the data out, what's the difference?
That said, you should pick your own comfort level. Other options include self hosting (there are commercial and OSS solutions which you can run on your own hardware).
You should also have a frank conversation with any providers about their security posture (sounds like the Clerk folks are going to add some docs to their site about this, which is great.)
Another consideration: you want the ability to export your users should you want to move services. People who aren't self hosting with FusionAuth can get a database export from us, for example, if they want to migrate.
> Another consideration: you want the ability to export your users should you want to move services. People who aren't self hosting with FusionAuth can get a database export from us, for example, if they want to migrate.
It's not even worth evaluating at the free tier without this. I asked in their slack and they said they intend to support this, which is promising (though sounds like it's not implemented yet)
First off, full disclosure: I don't work for Clerk; I work for a competitor which offers overlapping functionality, FusionAuth: https://fusionauth.io
I think a sibling comment laid it out well. It's a tradeoff. You are giving up some control over how your users are stored for significant acceleration of functionality. We've had customers say we saved them 1-2 person months of time in initial build, never mind ongoing maintenance.
Would you build an app using a database managed by someone else? Isn't data a crucial asset? Some call it the new oil, I've heard. Yet lots of people choose to use an outsourced database provider. Auth is more user facing than a database, but if you can get the data out, what's the difference?
That said, you should pick your own comfort level. Other options include self hosting (there are commercial and OSS solutions which you can run on your own hardware).
You should also have a frank conversation with any providers about their security posture (sounds like the Clerk folks are going to add some docs to their site about this, which is great.)
Another consideration: you want the ability to export your users should you want to move services. People who aren't self hosting with FusionAuth can get a database export from us, for example, if they want to migrate.