Migration Guide
Migrate from Clerk to Better Auth
Migrate from managed Clerk to self-hosted Better Auth: user and session data export, password hash handoff, organization plugin mapping, MFA re-enrollment, and frontend component rebuild.
What you get
Risk assessment
Blockers, warnings, and unknowns ranked by severity
Effort estimate
Hours, t-shirt size, and role breakdown
Cost estimate
Labor, infrastructure, and tooling cost range
Migration steps
Ordered execution plan with durations
Open questions
What still needs to be answered before you start
Draft config or code
Starter configs when the migration path supports it
Why teams migrate from Clerk to Better Auth
Good fit when
- +Teams moving off managed auth to regain data ownership, reduce per-user costs at scale, or run auth in their own VPC for compliance.
- +Apps whose auth needs fit Better Auth's plugin model (organizations, two-factor, passkeys, magic links).
- +Engineering teams comfortable operating a self-hosted auth service with their own database.
Strengths
- Full control over user data, session storage, and auth flows in your own database.
- Pluggable architecture — enable only the features you need (organizations, 2FA, passkeys, admin).
- No per-MAU pricing; costs scale with your infrastructure instead of your user base.
- Headless-first client lets you build custom auth UI without fighting hosted components.
Tradeoffs
- You own the operational burden: database schema, migrations, session storage, uptime.
- No hosted UI components — <SignIn/>, <UserButton/>, <OrganizationSwitcher/> have no drop-in replacement.
- MFA secrets and passkey credentials generally can't be exported from Clerk, so affected users re-enroll.
- Compliance certifications (SOC2, HIPAA) become your responsibility rather than the vendor's.
Migration notes
- Export users and password hashes via Clerk's Backend API; Better Auth accepts a custom hasher to match Clerk's bcrypt scheme for lossless migration.
- Map Clerk Organizations to Better Auth's organization plugin and translate role/permission models explicitly.
- Clerk sessions (JWT) and Better Auth sessions (stateful cookies by default) aren't compatible — plan forced reauth or dual-run with session invalidation.
- Re-register social providers at the provider level with new Better Auth callback URIs.
- Rebuild hosted UI with Better Auth's headless client; budget real engineering time for this.
- Replace Clerk webhook consumers with Better Auth lifecycle hooks or custom middleware.
How it works
Describe your migration
Select Clerk as source and Better Auth as target. Add context about your setup — configs, docs, architecture notes.
Keshro runs the analysis
Keshro researches the path, finds similar past migrations, and generates a structured assessment with risks, effort, cost, and steps.
Get your plan
Review the migration plan, refine it with your team, and use it as a living document during execution.
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