Clerk really is awesome. This is a good write up.

One thing I disagree with is the firebase recommendation. I’ve used it several times and it seems to consistently lead to misery. I haven’t worked with a single team in which everyone was glad they picked firebase. Auth has been part of the problem in several cases.

If you want to go with off the shelf features and behaviours, maybe you’ll be happy. React integration is definitely awkward as mentioned in the post.

I’m looking forward to the post on Ory. At the moment I use Clerk by default.

It’s possible to implement everything it does yourself, but it does such a solid job by default for such a low price that, unless your budget is $0, it’s hard to justify rolling your own. I believe they even have a fairly generous free tier, too.