better-auth and Lucia are TypeScript-first authentication libraries for JavaScript applications, designed to simplify session management, user authentication, and OAuth workflows. Lucia pioneered a minimal, server-only approach with manual control over authentication primitives, while better-auth emerged as a modern, plugin-extensible successor with framework-agnostic middleware and declarative configuration. Both libraries prioritize developer experience over opaque abstractions, making them popular among teams seeking lightweight alternatives to enterprise solutions.
This comparison is especially relevant in 2025 as Lucia has been officially deprecated by its maintainer, who transitioned it to an educational resource rather than a maintained package. better-auth has absorbed development momentum from both Lucia and Auth.js communities, positioning itself as the primary migration path for production applications. Developers evaluating authentication strategies for Node.js, Next.js, or Express apps must now weigh Lucia's legacy learning value against better-auth's active ecosystem and enterprise-ready features like multi-tenancy and OpenAPI integration.
Choose better-auth for any production application requiring authentication in 2025 and beyond. Its active maintenance, plugin ecosystem, and built-in middleware eliminate the security risks and technical debt of using deprecated libraries like Lucia. The migration path from Lucia is straightforward—better-auth's declarative config maps cleanly to Lucia's manual primitives, and the development team explicitly designed compatibility for Auth.js/Lucia refugees. For teams building SaaS platforms, the multi-tenancy and organization plugins solve complex access control patterns without custom code.
Lucia should only be referenced as a learning tool for understanding authentication internals, not deployed in new projects. Its deprecation means no security patches for emerging vulnerabilities, and the lack of OAuth plugin updates will break integrations as providers change APIs. Developers studying session management can read Lucia's archived guides to grasp cookie security and database schema design, then implement those patterns in better-auth for production. If you have existing Lucia code, prioritize migration immediately—the ecosystem has consolidated around better-auth as the community-endorsed successor.