Top 3 auth providers?
Hi guys!
Im in the process of adding two more auth providers to my login/sign up screens. I already have a email/pass option and Google. The next one is obviously facebook, or..? what about a third option? I guess this depends on the product and users but before you have any data how do you think about this decision? So what auth providers do you use, why and how did you arrive at those decisions?
Cheers
It's entirely based on the channels you plan on targeting and what type of data you want from the auth provider.
For example, the product I'm working on is a SAAS for developers and at some point, I would like to offer tighter integration (i.e hook directly into their repos). I know most developers are going to have GitHub and it offers this type of integration, so I'll push the this as the main provider.
From my experience: having more options is not better. The more you have, the more possibility of someone forgetting which one they used to sign up and creating duplicate accounts. This is annoying to resolve for you and the user.
Good point about what data you need from the provider. In my case I only need a name and a verifyed email.
Also very interesting point about that too many options are not always a good thing. I can imagen that this is the case where a user is faced with a wall of option it can come off as overwhelming and in worst case not signing up.
so maybe the question is: if I just use google and email/pass to begin with, would we miss out on a bunch of users? I wouldnt mind not working on adding any more providers and putting the time somewhere else 😅
The users who have the friction of having to enter their email details because you don't support their auth provider of choice are people who aren't that interested in the problem you're solving for them.
Most people have google and it does the job. See Autopilot as an example, they have the same setup and they have many many users https://www.autopilothq.com/
great example, love that ”light and easy”feeling sign up form they have
How are you aggregating the data between the different providers. Each is different and managing that can be a bit of a pain. I.e. if some users are using google and others facebook? Login, session management, token refresh can be annoying.
It should come from your customers. Don't try to over complicate auth, it has very little to the value of your product, email/password is usually good enough (maybe +Google if it takes <1 hour to implement). The users sign up because they want your product, if they quit just because you don't have an auth provider, I doubt if they'll pay.
That being said, having more auth provider may help increase conversion (it's a very small difference though), I often use out-of-the-box support of the Auth service I'm using because the effort is rather small, e.g. Amazon Cognito supports Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon sign-in out of the box.
Going further to make sure I build something useful, I usually create fake sign-in buttons from a couple of other auth providers, to see which button is clicked the most in a month, and build that in the month later.
My first choice will always be email/password, 2nd choice is Auth0, 3rd is google/microsoft/yahoo/snapchat/twitter/github/whatever.
I will probably never integrate with Facebook. I'd be more likely offer almost any other integration.
It's important to think about your platforms and target audience. For platform, if you're on iOS, Apple sign-in is a requirement now to get onto the app store. Consequently, Apple as an auth-provider is the number one more important provider for iOS.
For audience, as @harlanzw mentions, Github is good if you're targeting developers. Snapchat would be good to implement if you're going for Gen Z. Email and password is definitely the most universal.
Also great input, thanks, platform is ofcourse a huge factor on what providers you should support. Apple seems like a underused auth options in web today
..I tried to find some resourses on this topic with relevant data but couldnt find any. seems like a huge topic that could be analyzed in a blog format, just an idea if someone is sitting on some data about this and need a good topic to write about!