Better Auth vs Brandefense

Better Auth is an open-source authentication and authorization library for TypeScript, distributed under the MIT license. Instead of sending users to a hosted identity service, it runs inside your own backend and stores users, sessions and accounts in your own database through adapters for Drizzle, Prisma, Kysely, MongoDB and plain SQL drivers. It is framework-agnostic, with integrations for Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Astro, Hono, Express and others, and typed clients for React, Vue, Svelte, Solid and vanilla JavaScript.

The core covers email and password, social OAuth providers and session management; a plugin system adds two-factor authentication, passkeys, magic links, email OTP, username login, organizations with teams and roles, admin tools, multi-session, API keys, JWT, an OIDC provider and more. A CLI generates the schema and migrations each plugin needs. The library is free with no per-user pricing; an optional managed service (free Starter, $20/month Pro) adds a dashboard.

Better Auth suits TypeScript teams that want control over user data and login flows without writing auth from scratch. The trade-off is responsibility: you handle hosting, security updates and email delivery, and the core ships no prebuilt UI components. Clerk and Auth0 provide hosted UI, dashboards and enterprise SSO for a per-user fee; Supabase Auth is convenient if you already use Supabase; Auth.js (NextAuth) is the older open-source option with fewer built-in features.

The project grew quickly in 2024 and 2025 as Lucia was deprecated.

Brandefense is a cyber threat intelligence and digital risk protection platform founded in Ankara, Türkiye, by Caner Köroğlu and Hakan Eryavuz, with a US entity in Wilmington, Delaware. It watches the parts of the internet a company does not control, such as underground forums, dark web markets, messaging channels, phishing domains, fake apps and scam ads, and turns what it finds into alerts tied to the customer's own domains, brands, executives and IP ranges.

The product has three modules on top of an intelligence engine called Blackhole: Cyber Threat Intelligence (dark web monitoring, ransomware early warning, threat actor profiles), Digital Risk Protection (phishing monitoring, executive protection, takedowns) and External Attack Surface Management (asset discovery, shadow IT, misconfiguration checks). AI handles collection and correlation, and analysts verify critical findings. There is no free tier or public price list; it is sold as a quote-based subscription after a demo.

It fits banks, retailers and holding companies with a security team that can act on alerts. Smaller firms without a SOC will get less value. Against SOCRadar, the other Turkish name in this space, the pitch is analyst-verified findings and bundled takedowns; Recorded Future and ZeroFox have a larger global footprint.

In December 2023 Brandefense raised a 2.75 million dollar pre-Series A round led by Sabancı Ventures, bringing total funding to 3.4 million dollars. It reports 400+ customer organizations and 7,900+ protected brands. Ask for an exposure check on your domains in the demo.