Sessions vs JWT vs Cookies: Understanding Authentication Approaches

Hello readers 👋, welcome to the 15th blog in our Node.js series! In our previous posts, we built a REST API, learned how to protect routes with JWT, and explored middleware and file uploads. Authentication has come up several times, but today we’re going to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. We’ll compare three pillars of authentication in web applications: sessions , JSON Web Tokens (JWT) , and cookies . If you’ve ever been confused about when to use a session-based login, when t