In short, it's a second-gen platform that doesn't have to support a bunch of legacy customers, so we can make it much less complex to use.

We started doing auth because our dev customers kept telling us how much of a pain it was with the first-gen companies (Auth0 et al). With Userfront, you don't have to learn all the standards/protocols or deal with browser quirks, and things like testing, access control, and multi-tenancy are first-class features instead of things you spend lots of time on.

It's not owned by Okta (yet).

Not being owned by Okta would be one differentiator.