Udibo vs Better Auth

Better Auth is a free, MIT-licensed TypeScript authentication framework that runs inside your application over your own database, with plugins for organizations, two-factor authentication, passkeys, and SSO, and an optional managed infrastructure that starts at $0. Udibo gives you two options: a hosted service that operates sign-in, account recovery, MFA, abuse controls, audit history, and email for you behind a standard OAuth 2.0 boundary, and the @udibo/oauth2 package for application-owned authentication built as an OAuth2/OIDC server and client rather than a session framework. The difference that decides most evaluations: whether you want to run authentication or have it run for you, and if you run it, whether you want a session framework or a protocol server.

Checked September 7, 2026 against Better Auth's pricing page and documentation. Udibo Identity is in private beta, and its prices are a preview, not an adopted rate card.

The short version

Why teams pick Udibo over Better Auth

• Someone else is on call. Udibo Identity runs sign-in, account recovery, MFA, lockout and rate limiting, audit history, and the email it sends for you. With Better Auth the framework runs in your process against your database, and the hosting, email provider, upgrades, and incident response are yours; its managed infrastructure adds a dashboard, security detections, and email sending on top of a deployment you still operate.

• Permissions past the organization. Udibo lets you register the permissions your application interprets, attach them to roles across a tenant, inside an organization, or on one resource, and read the result from the token or a hosted check. Better Auth's organization plugin evaluates role statements inside your application; a role held on one specific record is yours to model.

• A record you can take with you. At least 90 days of audit history on every plan, exportable as CSV or NDJSON, plus signed webhooks with retries and redrive. In Better Auth, audit history is yours to build or comes from its managed infrastructure: 10,000 events a month with one day of retention on Starter, 20,000 a month then $0.0001 per event on Pro.

• A standards boundary instead of a framework boundary. Your application talks to Udibo through OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, with discovery, JWKS, introspection, and refresh-token rotation, and the active organization and its roles in the token. Any OpenID Connect client works. Better Auth's default integration is its own session API and client SDK; it can also act as an identity provider through a plugin.

• One bill instead of four line items. Udibo's hosted price covers running the service, storage, and email up to the allowance, and a sender you bring is never metered. Self-hosting Better Auth means hosting, a database, an email provider, and operations time, with the $20 Pro plan as a fifth optional line.

• The same client for both paths. The @udibo/oauth2 BFF and clients talk to either issuer: an authorization server you host with the package, or Udibo Identity. Choosing app-owned authentication first does not commit you to rewriting the client if you later hand sign-in to the hosted service.

Why Better Auth may still be the right choice

• No vendor, no beta gate. The framework is free and open source under the MIT license, your user records live in your tables, and it is generally available today. Udibo Identity is in private beta, and Udibo's open-source identity core is planned for release under the MIT license when the hosted service opens to the public.

• Plugins Udibo's hosted service does not match. Better Auth ships a passkey plugin (WebAuthn and FIDO2), an SSO plugin covering OpenID Connect, OAuth2, and SAML 2.0, two-factor authentication with TOTP, email or phone one-time codes, backup codes, and trusted devices, and an admin plugin for banning and impersonating users. Udibo's hosted MFA is authenticator apps with recovery codes; hosted passkeys, SAML, and SCIM are not available.

• Account features inside your app. Sign-up, sign-in, and organization management happen in your own pages through the client SDK, with no redirect to a hosted page. Udibo hosts the sign-in, recovery, and MFA pages; the @udibo/oauth2 package supplies optional React forms but no organizations model.

• Cheap, optional managed extras. The Starter infrastructure plan is $0 and Pro is $20 a month with per-event pricing past its allowances, so the managed layer can be added later without changing the framework.

Pricing side by side

Better Auth's published list and Udibo's pricing preview, same date. Better Auth's framework has no price; the figures in its column are for its optional managed infrastructure. Udibo bills retained users: a person who returns at least a day after signing up.

Two worked examples, with the same assumptions on both sides:

Sources: Better Auth pricing, the two-factor, organization, passkey, SSO, and admin plugin pages, session management, and Udibo's pricing preview. Both change; check the vendor's current page before you decide.

Cost at scale

Users only, same definition on both sides, on the plan that gives you MFA and your own branding. Udibo's figures are preview rates; Better Auth publishes no per-user rate at any size.

There is no crossover to find, because self-hosted software has no per-user price. What you pay for Better Auth instead is the server it runs on, the database that holds sessions and accounts, an email or SMS provider for codes and resets, and the engineering time to upgrade, monitor, and respond to incidents, with the $20 a month Pro plan as an option that adds a dashboard, detections, and metered email rather than replacing that operating work. The honest comparison is Udibo's hosted bill against that operating cost at your team's size, not against zero.

What the integration looks like

With Udibo Identity, register an application and its callback, send people to the hosted sign-in page, and finish the authorization-code flow on your server. Your backend holds the session and the browser gets a cookie, never a token. The first-login guide walks each checkpoint, and the organizations and permissions guides cover a person with a different role in each of two organizations.

With @udibo/oauth2, your application hosts the authorization server and its own login. The package supplies the OAuth2/OIDC server and clients, a backend-for-frontend with server-held tokens, and app-owned sign-up, sign-in, password reset, email verification, passwordless, TOTP with recovery codes, social and OpenID Connect sign-in, and imported password-hash verification. You supply persistent stores and run the exported contract tests against them; social sign-in is wired in your own routes by design, because account linking is application policy.

With Better Auth, you create an auth instance over your database adapter, add the plugins you need, mount its handler in your framework, and call its client SDK from your pages (Better Auth introduction). Sessions, organizations, and two-factor state live in your tables.

Neither approach removes your responsibility to protect application data on the server. A valid session says who someone is; your backend still decides what they may read.

Where Udibo needs a closer look

Udibo Identity does not currently offer hosted passkeys, SAML, or SCIM, and it hosts the sign-in pages rather than rendering components inside your app. Tenant-management calls need administrator credentials rather than an application's machine token. The @udibo/oauth2 package is version 0.1.0, so minor releases may contain breaking changes; it has no organizations, passkey, admin, or SSO module, and its Resource Owner Password grant cannot enforce MFA, so leave that grant unregistered unless a migration needs it. If your product depends on a particular plugin behaviour, write it down and test that whole journey before committing; a successful login alone does not establish parity.

Moving an existing Better Auth application

Inventory database adapters, plugins, hooks, session storage, and any frontend code calling authentication endpoints. Separate account data from application data so a new identity boundary does not require changing every business table. Give your own user records stable IDs and record the mapping from the old subject to the new one; do not use email alone as an automatic account-linking rule.

Review password-hash formats rather than assuming two TypeScript systems have compatible records. Better Auth hashes passwords with scrypt by default but does not publish the parameters or stored format; Udibo's import reads scrypt only as a <saltHex>:<keyHex> pair at N=16384, r=16, p=1, and refuses a record whose hash it cannot verify, so check a sample against the user import guide before planning to carry passwords across. The hosted service imports profiles and social identities and upgrades an accepted hash on first sign-in; the package's @udibo/oauth2/identity/migration module does the same for an app-owned login. If a plugin enforces an access rule or enrollment requirement, reproduce and test that behaviour explicitly. Two-factor enrollments, organizations, and active sessions do not move with a profile; plan a re-enrollment path. See migration planning.

Try next: complete one Udibo login, then give a person two organizations and a different role in each. If you are on the waitlist, the agent integration brief lets your coding assistant prepare the integration in the meantime.

Frequently asked questions

Is Udibo cheaper than Better Auth? Not in software cost: Better Auth is free and Udibo's hosted service is $0 on Free, $5 a month on Standard, and $20 at 10,000 retained users. The comparison is between that bill and what self-hosting costs you in hosting, a database, an email provider, and the time to run and upgrade it. A team that already operates those things may find Better Auth cheaper; a team that would rather not may not.

Does Udibo support passkeys like Better Auth's passkey plugin? No. Udibo's hosted MFA is authenticator apps with recovery codes, and the @udibo/oauth2 package has no passkey module. Hosted passkeys, SAML, and SCIM are not available today; Better Auth ships passkeys and SAML as plugins.

Can I move from Better Auth to Udibo without making users re-register? Profiles and social identities can be imported and linked by the provider's stable subject, and password hashes are imported with an upgrade on first sign-in. Two-factor enrollments, organizations, and active sessions need their own migration steps, so plan a re-enrollment path. See migration planning.

Can I use @udibo/oauth2 the way I would use Better Auth? Partly. The package covers app-owned sign-up, sign-in, password reset, email verification, passwordless, TOTP, and social sign-in, and it makes your application an OAuth2/OIDC issuer for your own APIs. It does not ship organizations, passkeys, an admin module, or database adapters; you supply the stores. Pick it when the protocol boundary is the point, and Better Auth when the plugin set is.

Last verified 2026-09-07.