Do coding agents recommend Better Auth?
Better Auth was chosen in 4% of 201 judged authentication sessions, ranking fifth. Measured with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.
Better Auth was chosen in 4% of 201 judged authentication sessions, ranking fifth. It was also raised as a candidate in 35 further sessions without being chosen.
This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex and Cursor had to solve a problem in authentication inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Better Auth. What an agent actually installed.
The numbers
| Category | Authentication |
| Sessions in the category | 201 |
| Sessions where Better Auth was chosen | 8 |
| Install share | 4% |
| Rank in category | 5 of 17 |
| Codebases it won in | 3 |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 35 |
| Chosen when considered | 19% |
| Site | better-auth.com |
By agent
With 8 wins spread across three agents, the rates below are small numbers and a difference between them is not yet a finding. They are here because the direction is worth knowing, not because the gap is established.
| Agent | Sessions | Chose Better Auth | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 65 | 3 | 5% |
| Codex | 68 | 2 | 3% |
| Cursor | 68 | 3 | 4% |
By who was asking
Better Auth performs similarly across the four kinds of buyer, from 0% to 8%. That is unusual: the category leader changed with the persona in 14 of the 18 categories we measured.
| Who is asking | Sessions | Chose Better Auth | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe coder | 26 | 0 | 0% |
| Junior developer | 62 | 5 | 8% |
| Senior engineer | 69 | 3 | 4% |
| Enterprise team | 44 | 0 | 0% |
What Better Auth was up against
The full ranking in authentication, from the same sessions:
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WorkOS AuthKit | 53 | 26% |
| 2 | Auth0 | 46 | 23% |
| 3 | Microsoft Entra ID | 21 | 10% |
| 4 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 21 | 10% |
| 5 | Clerk | 20 | 10% |
| 6 | Better Auth (this page) | 8 | 4% |
| 7 | Keycloak | 7 | 3% |
| 8 | Google Identity | 3 | 1% |
What this means
This is an integration problem, not a presence problem. Agents raised Better Auth in 35 sessions and chose it in 8, so it reaches the shortlist and then loses. Something at the last step is costing the session, and in our data that is usually a quickstart that does not run when pasted, documentation describing an interface that changed, or a package name that does not match the product name.
That is the cheaper of the two problems to have. The reason is written down in each losing transcript.
Where these numbers come from
The 201 sessions in authentication are part of a published set of 5,292, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.
Every authentication run can be replayed on the board.
If you work on Better Auth: the judge recorded a reason for every session where it was raised and passed over. Those reasons are in the transcripts.
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Common questions
Do coding agents recommend Better Auth?
Yes. Better Auth was chosen in 8 of the 201 judged sessions in authentication, a 4% install share, ranking fifth in its category.
Does Claude Code recommend Better Auth?
In 3 of the 65 sessions in authentication run with Claude Code, which is 5%.
Do different coding agents treat Better Auth differently?
Not much. The three agents chose it at similar rates, between 3% and 5% of their runs.
How was this measured?
Real coding agents at pinned versions were run in sandboxes inside 51 realistic codebases and asked to solve real tasks. A simulated project owner approved or questioned each recommendation before any code was written, and a judge from a model family that builds none of the agents read every session blind.
How often is Better Auth considered but not chosen?
It was raised as a candidate in 35 sessions without being chosen, and chosen in 8. That is a 19% conversion from considered to chosen.
Where this comes from
Armature ran 5,292 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor inside 51 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.