What each approach actually trusts
Social login relies on a provider that has already verified the user through its own account recovery, MFA and fraud systems. Your application trusts the provider’s attestation of an email address, delivered through a signed token or a verified API response.
A magic link relies on control of an inbox. Your application generates a single-use, time-limited link and trusts that only the account owner can click it. That trust is only as strong as the mailbox’s own security and your link’s randomness and expiry.
Conversion and friction
Social login usually wins on speed when a user already has an active session with the provider: one click, no waiting for an email. Magic links add a context switch to an inbox, and delivery delays or spam filtering can quietly kill conversion.
Magic links avoid provider selection fatigue: there is no row of buttons to choose from, and no risk that a user forgets which provider they used last time. That single-path simplicity can offset the extra step.
Operational cost
Social login pushes deliverability and account-recovery cost onto the provider, but adds integration and maintenance work per provider, plus occasional API or consent-screen changes to track.
Magic links push the operational burden onto your own email sending: reputation, deliverability, SPF/DKIM/DMARC configuration and template rendering across mail clients. A blocked sending domain fails every login attempt at once.
Security considerations that differ
A leaked magic link is a bearer credential until it expires or is used, so short expiry and single use matter as much as they do for a Login Broker session ID. A leaked social login session reference is similarly a reference, not a credential, and should be verified server-side exactly the same way.
Shared or forwarded inboxes are a real-world failure mode for magic links that social login does not have, since a provider account is normally tied to one person.
A practical combination
Many products offer both: social login for users who already have an account with a supported provider, and a magic link as the fallback for everyone else. That combination covers most audiences without forcing a single identity model on all users.
Whichever path a user takes, the same rule applies: never trust a client-supplied status. Verify the completed result server-side before creating an application session.