Show HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – the open-source Auth0/Clerk alternative

[n2d4]

https://github.com/stack-auth/stack

Hi HN! We're Zai and Konsti, and we're building Stack Auth [0], an open-source managed authentication & authorization platform.

Stack Auth was born out of years of frustration with the incumbents. We wanted to build something that is developer-friendly and open-source at the same time, yet fully managed.

User data is quite critical, and you generally don't want to get locked into a specific vendor. On the other hand, building and maintaining auth infrastructure on-top of existing libraries is tedious work as you grow. Hence:

- Stack is 100% open-source, licensed under MIT and AGPL.

- You can self-host, or choose to use our managed hosting.

- If you choose the latter, there's absolutely no reliance on us; if you think we're doing a bad job at any point in time, you can export all your data and start self-hosting instead.

Also, we're more than just authentication — we have authorization built-in, and a frontend to manage your users. You can use any language to access these features through our REST API [1].

We also have a bunch of components for sign in, password reset, organizations. For now, we only support Next.js frontends and backends in any language with our API, though our docs also list the client endpoints, and some contributors have been building frontends for other languages.

For more info, check out our GitHub repo [2]. Any feedback is highly appreciated!

Thanks all!

[0] https://stack-auth.com

[1] https://docs.stack-auth.com/rest-api/auth

[2] https://github.com/stack-auth/stack

[nilirl]

Hi, I currently use Supabase when I need auth for a new application. Of all the features Supabase offers, auth coming coupled with a Postgres db is my favorite.

I like the UI components and RBAC, but could you help me with when I should consider Stack over something like Supabase?

Good luck with everything!

[n2d4 → nilirl]

Sure! Supabase is great, though their authentication is really just authN and doesn't have authZ or anything more advanced like impersonation, connected accounts, orgs, etc. We are more focussed on building the entire package.

We have some stuff planned that'll let you use Supabase RLS with Stack Auth, so you can get the benefits of both. That way, you could do fancy stuff like checking for org membership or permissions inside an RLS rule. I think Supabase DB + Stack Auth could be quite powerful in the future.

If you don't use RLS, then we are pretty much a drop-in replacement.

[nilirl → n2d4]

I see. So correct me if I'm wrong, but currently the most attractive thing about Stack, when compared to the other AuthN alternatives, is that it ships with a lot of features to get complex AuthZ setup? That's definitely cool. I think your docs could go into how this is made simpler/faster.

Thank you for building this!

[n2d4 → nilirl]

Pretty much, I think that sums it up quite well :)