Auth Strategies: The Right Tool for the Right Scenario

A practical developer guide to sessions, JWTs, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, SAML, API keys, mTLS, passkeys, and magic links — without picking sides. The Auth Debate Is a False Binary Every few months the same argument erupts: "Sessions are better than JWTs!" followed swiftly by "But JWTs scale!" The developers in the middle — the ones shipping products — are left more confused than when they started. Here's the truth: there is no universally "best" auth strategy. There are eight major approaches (with meaningful variants), and each one was designed to solve a specific class of problem. Picking the wrong one doesn't mean you're a bad engineer — it usually means you applied a solution from a different context to yours. This guide maps every major auth strategy to the scenarios where it excels, where it struggles, and where the tradeoffs are genuinely nuanced. No flamewars. Just reasoning. The Full Landscape: Eight Auth Strategies You Should Know Before diving into scenarios, here's a concise mental m