Session management is crucial for creating secure, interactive, and personalized user experiences in web applications, as it addresses the stateless nature of HTTP by allowing applications to remember users' actions and preferences. This involves creating, maintaining, and terminating sessions with unique session IDs, which track user interactions and ensure data security. Effective session management mitigates risks like session hijacking and fixation through best practices such as using secure, random session identifiers, implementing HTTPS, enforcing session expiration, and regenerating session IDs upon login. Common techniques include cookie-based and token-based sessions, each with its advantages and trade-offs. Token-based sessions, often used in RESTful APIs and Single Page Applications, support stateless authentication and are scalable and secure across diverse environments. Developers prioritize security, scalability, performance, simplicity, and privacy when choosing session management methods. Tools like Descope offer solutions to simplify the integration of advanced session management into applications, balancing security and usability.