Best Clerk Alternatives in 2026: Auth Priced per User

A Clerk alternative is a hosted or self-managed authentication provider that gives a web app sign-up, sign-in, sessions and user management, priced on monthly active users rather than on seats. The reason teams shop around is the meter: Clerk bills every retained user past 50,000, and that line grows with the product. This page computes what nine providers charge at 10,000, 50,000 and 100,000 users, so the comparison is a bill rather than a feature list.

Toolradar data: of the 104 identity and access tools listed in the Toolradar identity and access ranking as of October 2026, 59% are free, freemium or open source. The median cheapest paid plan is $17.50/mo across the 22 tools that publish one. Auth providers for product teams compete there with workforce identity suites and password managers, which is why the cheap end of that list is not a Clerk replacement.

This page is about leaving Clerk at a known cost. The plan-by-plan detail of what you leave is in the Clerk pricing breakdown and the Clerk review, and the wider ranking of the category is the best authentication providers guide.

Clerk counts monthly retained users (MRU): a user counts only after returning at least 24 hours after sign-up, so a sign-up that never comes back is never billed. The Hobby plan is free with 50,000 MRU per app, three dashboard seats and a fixed 7-day session, and it leaves out MFA, passkeys, branding removal and user bans. Pro is $25/mo on monthly billing or $20/mo billed annually, and it includes 50,000 MRU, then $0.02 each from 50,001 to 100,000, $0.018 from 100,001 to 1 million and $0.015 above that.

The B2B meters sit beside the user meter. Pro includes one SSO connection, then $75/mo each for connections 2 through 15 and $60/mo each from 16 to 100, and the Enhanced B2B add-on is $100/mo ($85 annually) with organizations at $1/mo each past 100. Business is $300/mo ($250 annually) for a SOC 2 report and 10 dashboard seats, and Enterprise is a custom annual contract with the HIPAA BAA and the 99.99% SLA.

How we compared: on 26 October 2026 we read the pricing pages of Clerk and the nine providers below. We then computed each provider's monthly bill for 10,000, 50,000 and 100,000 monthly active users on its cheapest plan that admits that volume. Only printed prices enter the arithmetic: users times a per-user rate, plus the base fee. Clerk counts retained users and the others count active users, so Clerk's bill for the same app is usually a little lower than a straight comparison suggests. Enterprise SSO and organizations are listed separately because they move a B2B bill. The ranking is by that computed cost, then by what the plan includes at the price.

Clerk is free until 50,000 retained users, and the bill is about a thousand dollars a month by 100,000. The arithmetic on monthly billing is $25 plus 50,000 extra users at $0.02, which is $1,025/mo, or $1,020/mo on the annual rate. At 10,000 and 50,000 users, Hobby costs nothing, and Pro only matters if you need MFA, passkeys or branding removal below that line.

The three cheapest exits do not meter users at these volumes. WorkOS AuthKit is free through 1 million MAU and charges $2,500/mo per additional million, so all three scenarios cost $0 before SSO. Better Auth is an open-source framework that stores users in your database, and its hosted Infrastructure plan is $20/mo flat with unlimited seats. Supabase Auth is included in the Pro plan with 100,000 MAU, then $0.00325 per user, so 200,000 users is $350/mo by our arithmetic. The Free plan covers 50,000 MAU. It pauses a project after one week of inactivity, though, which rules it out for anything live.

The per-user providers land in a band around Clerk. Amazon Cognito Essentials includes 10,000 MAU and bills $0.015 each above that: $600/mo at 50,000 and $1,350/mo at 100,000. Kinde Pro adds $0.0175 per user past 10,500 to its base fee: $716.25/mo at 50,000 and $1,591.25/mo at 100,000, with users on a paid subscription exempt from the meter. Auth0 is free to 25,000 MAU. Its self-serve slider ends at 30,000 MAU and the page sends you to sales, so the 50,000 and 100,000 scenarios have no printed price. Stytch includes 10,000 users and five SSO or SCIM connections at no base fee. The rate above that comes from the calculator on its pricing page rather than a printed per-user figure.

Two B2B specialists cost the most at scale because their per-user rate is two and a half times Clerk's. PropelAuth Growth is $150/mo with 10,000 users included, which is $2,150/mo at 50,000 and $4,650/mo at 100,000, with every SAML connection included. Descope Pro is $249/mo billed annually with 10,000 MAU, so 50,000 users is $2,249/mo and 100,000 is $4,749/mo; the $799/mo Growth plan with 25,000 included is cheaper at that top scenario, $4,549/mo. Both pay off only when tenants and SSO connections, not consumer users, are what you have thousands of.

Read the per-user rate and the free allowance before the base fee, because the base fee runs from nothing to $249/mo while the user line at 100,000 runs from nothing to about $4,500. The 10,000-user scenario is free on every provider except Descope, whose Free Forever plan stops at 7,500 MAU. A small app can treat the entry price as a tie and choose on features. At 50,000, Clerk is still free on Hobby while the per-user providers already bill several hundred dollars. At 100,000, WorkOS, Better Auth and Supabase separate from everyone else.

Two caveats change individual rows. Kinde does not count users who are on a paid subscription, so a SaaS with mostly paying customers pays far less than the computed figure. Descope and Auth0 price their paid plans on annual billing, and Clerk's annual rate is the one to compare with them. Enterprise SSO is the line to add for any B2B product. With ten customer connections, Clerk adds $675/mo, WorkOS $1,250/mo, Better Auth $450/mo and Descope Pro $250/mo (five included, then $50 each). Kinde Plus and PropelAuth Growth include them all.

Prices were read on 26 October 2026 on Clerk pricing, WorkOS pricing, Better Auth pricing, Supabase pricing, Amazon Cognito pricing, Kinde pricing, Auth0 pricing, Stytch pricing, PropelAuth pricing and Descope pricing. The scenario totals are our arithmetic on those printed rates. For the plan-level detail of the two biggest names, see the Auth0 pricing page and the Supabase pricing page.