Comment by colinclerk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinclerk | Hacker News Reader

https://clerk.dev is hiring remote frontend engineers, US or EU timezones only, in-person in San Francisco if desired

We're a small team (<20) and have seen consistent customer growth since January

We build drop-in auth components for React: <SignUp/>, <SignIn/>, and <UserProfile/>

And corresponding hooks so developers can design their own: useSignUp(), useSignIn(), useUser()

Going forward, we've noticed that the last generation of developer tools have failed to embrace React, so we're building a unified platform of components and hooks.

Since we manage authentication, we can safely expose other devtools directly to the frontend. A proof of concept for this is our use-stripe-subscription, where we allow users to purchase and manage their own subscription through a useSubscription() hook: https://github.com/clerkinc/use-stripe-subscription

Email me (cofounder): colin@clerk.dev

How does this compare to auth0? Genuinely curious

The main benefit is that we're much, much easier to use with React. Since the Okta acquisition, we've also had several migrate over for better pricing.

If you're interested in the technical reasons why & how:

Auth0 is structured as on OAuth provider, which is great for verifying identity but it stops there. Developers are responsible for persisting a session and managing user data on their own.

Developers using auth0 will normally create a "users" table in their database and have their backend team create endpoints to manage the data. Clerk handles all that for you... we expose useUser() to the frontend, and devs can call things like `user.update({firstName: "foo"})` to retrieve profile information. (Most teams using Clerk don't have a users table at all and use our API instead, though plenty still choose to keep it synced in their database.)

We're able to offer hooks like useUser() because we manage sessions, so we always know which user is signed in. As part of managing sessions, we include session revocation and device management - things that every company will need eventually but may skip over from the start. Because of this, we're often seen as more secure by default than auth0.

What's a MAU?

monthly active user

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