Head to head
WorkOS (AuthKit) vs Clerk
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
51/100 | 53/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #4 | #3 |
| Confidence | High confidence | Medium confidence |
| External Reputation | 69 | 70 |
| AI Authority | 37 | 63 |
| Web Authority | 35 | 14 |
| Expert Assessment | 61 | 52 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | 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 | 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 |
| Pricing model | Freemium with per-connection subscription add-ons | Subscription (metered on monthly retained users) |
| Best for | 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. | 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. |
| Avoid if | 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. | 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. |
| Markets | SMB, Startups, Mid-Market, Enterprise, B2B SaaS | SMB, Mid-Market, B2B SaaS, Startups |
| 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.