I already think of Auth0 as being the stripe of the auth world. What frustrations did you run into with them, and what are your goals to differentiate with feather?
I really thought the same when we first integrated with Auth0 for one of our projects! Most of our frustration with them boiled down into 2 points:
1. The Auth0 universal login solution is not "white-label".
It requires pushing users to an auth0.com pop-up page which has rather limited customization options. Granted they do allow their customers to upgrade to "custom domains", but they up-sell on this point (minimum $23/month) which doesn't make it ideal for us bootstrappers just wanting to get a demo running.
We additionally had a handful of users mention our login flow felt insecure. We determined this to be more imagined than factual, but figured it was a result of the change in design language between our app and the auth0.com pop-up. It was particularly acute when transitioning from native iOS to a web pop-up when entering sensitive information.
The underlying feedback we kept hearing around the login flow was along the lines of “why am I giving my password to this sketchy-looking website rather than to your app?”
2. The Auth0 docs and interfaces are a maze!
We had a terribly difficult time piecing together tips and footnotes from the community support forums and tutorials on Google to complete the information provided in the docs themselves.
There were a number of steps we needed to implement which were completely omitted from the official docs. We found others were running into the same problems as well on the community support forums.
For us, this essentially resulted in a feeling that Auth0 was letting too much complexity bleed through the interfaces for the developer figure out themselves.
—
So these are the two driving reasons we started hacking around on Feather:
- To have a truly white-label auth API
- To have more intuitive interfaces and documentation
