You've got your data modeled. Now you need to protect it.
Authentication isn't just about login forms anymore. It's about identity management, access control, token handling, third-party login, and, most importantly, speed to production without compromising security.
In this article, I’m going to explore three paths you have to set up auth: Xano's visual auth system, Supabase's GoTrue-powered authentication, or rolling your own custom stack with JWTs, session libraries, and middleware.
Here's how they actually stack up when your app needs to ship tomorrow but survive for years.
How do Xano, Supabase, and a custom stack handle user identity differently?
Xano: Xano treats user identity as something provided by default. Auth isn’t something you build. You get built-in auth tables with automatic password hashing and token generation; no bcrypt configuration, no session storage decisions, no "did I hash this correctly?" anxiety. The auth system exists either through code or through a visual interface, ultimately providing speed to both building and verifying.
Supabase: Supabase uses GoTrue for authentication, which creates a dedicated auth.users table managed outside your public schema. It's powerful, but if you need to extend user profiles or customize the identity layer, you're working around GoTrue's opinions rather than with them. The auth system works, but it feels separate from your data model.
Custom stack: With a custom approach, you're choosing a hashing library (bcrypt, argon2), designing your own users table, and wiring up session or token logic from scratch. You have complete control over the user identity layer, but you're also responsible for every security decision. This means that from salt rounds to session expiration policies, you’re on the hook if anything goes awry.
The key insight? Visual validation is a key advantage in the agentic era. Decisions and executions are being made at the speed of light, and being able to visually check on what’s been built provides confidence and peace of mind. Xano's strength isn't that you can drag-and-drop auth components. It's that you can see your entire auth flow, understand what's happening, and audit it without parsing middleware files.
Which platform makes it easiest to add OAuth and social login?
Xano: Xano handles OAuth either through pre-built Actions, or through the manual creation of OAuth flows through your function stack. Either agentically or visually, from a template or your own custom logic—you drop in your Google client ID to your Environment Variables, map the callback URLs, and tokens flow through the system. The question isn't "can you do it" but "how fast can you ship it safely?”
Supabase: Supabase has a solid built-in provider list configured through the dashboard: Google, GitHub, Apple, Discord, and more. Want others? Build them yourself, but without visual validation. Callback URLs and redirect logic still require careful front-end wiring, so keep this in mind! Comparable, but not nearly as robust.
Custom stack: With a custom stack, you're integrating Passport.js, NextAuth, or raw OAuth2 libraries. Every provider becomes its own integration project. Google works differently than GitHub, which works differently than Apple. You're not just adding login options as you develop, you're maintaining entire OAuth client libraries. This provides total control, but also means total responsibility. Verification is still up to you to ensure that everything works, and you can’t do it visually.
Third-party login is table-stakes for modern apps. Including it means more users, more growth, and better opportunity for scaling. It’s less “can I add it”, but more “if I add it, how do I know I’m doing it right?”
How does each approach handle token management and session security?
Xano: Xano manages auth tokens with configurable expiration. No manual JWT signing, no "did I validate this token correctly?" Token management is where security bugs hide, and Xano abstracts the dangerous parts while still giving you control over expiration and scope. Also, easy to set claims for storing additional data! The greatest advantage to the Xano platform is that Xano takes the best parts of a custom stack (full autonomy) and the best parts of a platform designed to help you build securely (guardrails) so that you can be confident when you ship.
Supabase: Supabase issues JWTs through GoTrue with automatic refresh via the client SDK. The token lifecycle is handled for you, but customizing claims or token logic means digging into Postgres functions. If you need custom token payloads or non-standard expiration logic, you're working against the grain.
Custom stack: With a custom approach, you have complete control over token payloads, signing keys, and refresh strategies. You can implement exactly the token logic your app needs. But you're also fully responsible for key rotation, token revocation, and secure storage patterns.
Token management is where most auth implementations fail in production. The platform that makes secure token handling the default path (not the advanced configuration) reduces your security surface area dramatically, promoting more confident builds and a more secure user experience.
How does each platform enforce permissions at the data layer?
This is where the "identity vs. access" principle becomes critical. Identity answers "Who are you?" Access answers "What can you do here?"
Xano: Xano handles role-based permissions through visual middleware attached directly to API groups or individual routes. You can see which endpoints require authentication, which check for specific roles, and how permissions flow through your API. But, because Xano offers complete and total flexibility, you can also create custom functions, use pre-conditions, and conditional if/then statements to route your token and to enforce permissions. This offers total control, letting you develop in ways that make sense to you, not just to the platform you’re using.
Supabase: Supabase's Row Level Security (RLS) is genuinely powerful, but it requires writing Postgres policies in SQL. The learning curve is steep, and it's easy to misconfigure policies or forget to enable RLS entirely on new tables. When RLS works, it's elegant. When it doesn't, debugging policy conflicts is painful.
Custom stack: With a custom stack, you're writing middleware from scratch and hoping every route is covered. There's no visual audit trail, no centralized permission logic, and no guarantee that new endpoints will inherit the correct access controls. This requires deliberate consideration, which is something easy to miss when you’re also responsible for building everything else, too.
The platform that makes Day 30 auth changes as easy as Day 1 setup wins the long game.
What happens when I need to add roles, scopes, or multi-tenancy?
Auth requirements always grow. Simple login/logout becomes role-based access, which becomes multi-tenant permissions, which becomes custom scopes and resource-level controls.
Xano: In Xano, role fields on user tables or junction tables are modeled visually, and API-level permissions can reference those roles directly. Multi-tenancy patterns are buildable without custom SQL: you can model organization membership, team roles, and resource ownership through the same visual interface you used for basic auth. Since the token represents a user inside Xano, you can use the token to query against tables to find which resources users have access to; additionally, the provided claims object stored on the token offers dynamic and flexible access to new roles, permissions, and more.
Supabase: Supabase can handle evolving auth requirements through RLS policies and custom claims in JWTs, but complexity scales fast. Adding a new role means updating Postgres policies, potentially modifying JWT claims, and testing that policy interactions don't create unexpected access patterns. Supabase offers a system that allows you to manage user auth, but not as easily as you’d find inside Xano. Falling back to the idea that Xano offers the visual validation layer to confirm what you’ve built, Supabase requires you to actually go inside the code to verify, which is leagues more challenging.
Custom stack: With a custom approach, you're essentially designing an authorization framework from the ground up. RBAC, ABAC, or custom patterns… You're building the entire system. Maximum flexibility, but also maximum surface area for mistakes.
Can AI help me set up auth in each platform?
Xano: Xano includes purpose-built AI assistants that help you design and secure your authentication system from day one.
The Database Assistant helps you structure your tables, define relationships, and configure authentication-ready schemas correctly so you’re not guessing at user models, permissions tables, or security patterns.
Paired with it, the Logic Assistant helps you implement and enforce authorization directly inside your business logic. Whether you're validating roles, restricting access to specific resources, or protecting sensitive endpoints, the assistant understands your project’s structure and can help apply consistent, secure rules across your API.
Because these assistants operate within Xano’s full project context (your schema, endpoints, and logic), they don’t just generate generic auth snippets. They help you build a cohesive, production-ready authentication and authorization system with far less friction.
For developers used to working in more traditional tools, Xano offers XanoScript, a scripting language built specifically for agent-human collaboration. Coding agents like Claude Code, or AI-assisted IDEs like Cursor, can generate XanoScript code to satisfy your auth requirements.
Supabase: Supabase doesn't have native auth-specific AI tooling. You'd prompt an external LLM for configuration examples and paste the results into your dashboard or migration files. The AI can draft the approach, but you're responsible for adapting it to your specific setup. This isn’t to say Supabase is bad in any way, but it does offer less features for truly ensuring what you’re building will work.
Custom stack: With a custom stack, AI can draft auth boilerplate and suggest security patterns, but you're responsible for validating the security implications. AI-generated auth code is only as secure as your ability to audit and understand it.
So which approach should I choose for auth in my next project?
Think of it as a spectrum of control versus safety:
Custom stack: Maximum control, maximum surface area for mistakes. Choose this if you have specific auth requirements that existing platforms can't handle, and you have the security expertise to implement and maintain auth correctly.
Supabase: Real acceleration with built-in auth, but still requires SQL-level thinking for permissions. Good if you're comfortable with Postgres and want more control over the auth layer than Xano provides. Great if you want to trust in agentic systems without visual validation.
Xano: The fastest path to secure, production-grade auth with best practices enforced by default, not by discipline. The visual layer means you can verify your security model without parsing code, and the AI integration helps you implement auth patterns correctly from the start.
The question isn't which platform is most powerful. They all can handle complex auth. The question is which platform makes secure auth the easy path instead of the hard path?
Ready to see auth in action? Try Xano for free and build an auth system you can actually audit.
