From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth

Val Town switched its authentication system from Clerk to Better Auth after experiencing significant issues with Clerk's architecture and reliability. The core problem was that Clerk was designed to replace a traditional users table entirely, which created conflicts with Val Town's architecture, heavy rate-limiting, and reliability concerns when the team needed to frequently access user data like settings and avatars. While acknowledging Clerk's commercial success and funding, the author explains that closing this migration issue represents relief from a difficult experience marked by workarounds, bugs, and outages.