Clerk vs Auth0 vs WorkOS

Three auth platforms with three different shapes — a developer-first B2C/B2B suite, the enterprise identity incumbent, and an enterprise-readiness layer you bolt on later.

Clerk

Authentication and user management built for developers

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Auth0

Secure access for everyone, but not just anyone

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Our take

Pick Clerk when you want signup, sessions, and a polished user UI working in an afternoon — the fastest onramp for B2C and early B2B. Pick Auth0 when SSO, SAML, advanced compliance, and a complex multi-tenant identity model are non-negotiable from day one, usually because enterprise contracts are already on the table. Pick WorkOS when you've already built your own auth or use Clerk for the core flows and just need an enterprise-readiness layer — SAML, SCIM, audit logs — to close enterprise deals without rip-and-replace.

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At a Glance

Attribute	Clerk	Auth0	WorkOS
Category	Authentication	Authentication	Authentication
Pricing Model	freemium	freemium	freemium
Starting Price	Free / $25/mo	Free / $23/mo	Free
Free Tier	Yes	Yes	Yes
Open Source	No	No	No
Platforms	web, mobile, api	web, mobile, api	—

Community Popularity

Clerk

Auth0

WorkOS

Key Features

Clerk

prebuilt UI components
social login
MFA
organizations
user impersonation
session management
JWT templates

Auth0

Pros & Cons

Clerk

Pros

The pre-built UI components handle every auth flow including MFA, magic links, and OAuth and they look good out of the box+176
TypeScript SDK is excellent — user object is typed and available in both server and client components in Next.js without extra setup+158
Organization support for B2B SaaS is built in — multi-tenant with roles and permissions without writing any of that infrastructure yourself+143
The developer dashboard makes impersonating users and inspecting sessions trivially easy, which saves hours when debugging user issues+127
Webhooks fire reliably for every user lifecycle event so syncing your own database with auth state is straightforward+108

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Auth0

Pros

Battle-tested enterprise auth with every compliance certification you'd need to close enterprise deals (SOC2, HIPAA, etc.)+163
The rules and actions pipeline lets you add custom logic to every auth step — useful for things like provisioning users in your database on first login+141
Every social provider, SAML IdP, and enterprise connection you could need is supported and well documented+128
Organizations feature handles multi-tenancy with per-org branding and connection settings which is essential for B2B+117

Cons

Pricing is confusing and the free tier limit of 7,500 MAU sounds generous until you hit it and face a $23/mo minimum with rapid escalation at scale+178
The dashboard UX is notoriously complex — simple tasks like finding where to add a social connection take 10 minutes the first time+154
Tenant architecture means your dev, staging, and prod environments are separate tenants that can't share configuration without manual duplication+112
Log retention on the free tier is only 2 days which makes debugging user auth issues that happened last week impossible+89

See full review of Auth0→