Lucia vs Kinde

At a Glance

Lucia

Kinde

Lucia

Pros

Extremely lightweight and gives you full control over sessions and auth logic without any magic happening behind the scenes+148
Framework agnostic — works with SvelteKit, Astro, Nuxt, and vanilla Node.js equally well with the same core logic+134
You can audit every line of code since it's open source and the codebase is small enough to actually read+109
No external service dependency means auth works as long as your own server works — no third-party SLA to worry about+96

Cons

More boilerplate required than hosted solutions — you're responsible for building password reset, email verification, and MFA yourself

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Kinde

Pros

Generous free tier at 10,500 MAU with no credit card required, and the pricing is more transparent than Auth0 or Clerk+152
The dashboard is clean and intuitive — you can get a new OAuth app connected in under 5 minutes without reading any docs+137
Feature flagging is built in alongside auth, which saves setting up a separate tool like LaunchDarkly for early-stage products+118
Machine-to-machine auth for API tokens is well implemented and the docs cover it clearly+96

Cons

SDK and documentation coverage is thinner than Clerk or Auth0 — you'll hit undocumented scenarios that require support tickets+124
Custom claims and advanced role configurations can be unintuitive to set up compared to more mature auth platforms+98
The product is still maturing and has had breaking changes to SDKs that required migration with little notice+81