Changelog Nov 5, 2021

Session management as-a-service

Our biggest launch this week is Session Management. As we built support for Next.js authentication at the edge (launched last week), we realized that our session management solution should be launched and marketed as a standalone product.

Our key insight was that developers use "authentication" to refer to two distinct concepts:

• User authentication - when a user verifies their identity to sign-in
• Session authentication - when an application's backend determines which user is making a request

Clerk has always offered both, but the session side of our offering used to be hidden in the background.

Our launch today brings many improvements to our session management offering, and in parallel, begins highlighting the advantages separately. The key advantages are:

• Sub-millisecond session authentication
• Active device management and revocation
• Allowing multiple users to be signed in simultaneously on a single device

Soon, we plan to completely decouple session management from our user management product. This is meant for developers who already have a user management solution, but are looking for one (or all) of the key advantages above.

<UserProfile/> is now extensible

Several developers have asked if they can add more sections to our User Profile component. We've added options to make the component more easily extensible, including an option to hide our default navigation bar so developers can build their own with extra sections.

Discord and GitLab social sign-in

We've added support for social sign-in with Discord and GitLab. Twitter is now under development!

New Guide: Syncing user data to your backend

Most of our customers do not need to sync user data to their own backend, but a few still need to. We've added a guide for syncing data to your backend using Svix, our webhook partner.