Head to head
Clerk vs WorkOS (AuthKit)
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
53/100Higher score | 51/100 | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #3 | #4 |
| Confidence | Medium confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 70 | 69 |
| AI Authority | 63 | 37 |
| Web Authority | 14 | 35 |
| Expert Assessment | 52 | 61 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | From $25/mo (Pro) — vendor-domain explainer, not verified on the billing page · free tier: Free "Hobby" plan covering 50,000 monthly retained users; all features free in development mode | Enterprise SSO from $125/connection/month (third-party sourced; vendor pricing page not retrievable this session) · free tier: AuthKit/User Management free to 1,000,000 MAU, including email/password, social auth, Magic Auth, MFA, bot protection, identity linking, org modeling and domain verification; staging SSO and Directory Sync connections are unbilled |
| Pricing model | Subscription (metered on monthly retained users) | Freemium with per-connection subscription add-ons |
| Best for | React/Next.js product teams shipping B2B SaaS or paid B2C below roughly 50k retained users, who value time-to-launch over auth-layer control, have engineers able to work around component styling limits, and whose incident tolerance can absorb slow vendor support. | B2B SaaS companies with an enterprise sales motion and ACVs comfortably above ~$1,500/year per SSO customer that need SAML, SCIM and audit logs shipped in weeks, especially where MAU volume is high but the paid connection count is modest. |
| Avoid if | You run a non-JavaScript stack, need deep domain-specific authorization, operate a free/ad-supported or high-churn consumer app at scale, need Clerk to be your billing system today, or carry hard support SLAs and regulated uptime obligations. | You want to offer SSO on a low-priced self-serve tier, you are building a consumer/B2C app needing adaptive risk and fraud detection, you need granular RBAC or Auth0-style session management out of the box, or you require a deep current review corpus before taking on a core dependency. |
| Markets | SMB, Mid-Market, B2B SaaS, Startups | SMB, Startups, Mid-Market, Enterprise, B2B SaaS |
| Founded | — | — |
| Headquarters | — | San Francisco, USA |
A higher TOP SCORE means more of the evidence favours that platform on this methodology — it is not a recommendation, and it does not account for your specific requirements. Advertisers are never declared the winner of a comparison.