Kinde vs Clerk

At a Glance

Kinde

Clerk

Kinde

No features listed.

Clerk

Kinde

Pros

Generous free tier at 10,500 MAU with no credit card required, and the pricing is more transparent than Auth0 or Clerk+152
The dashboard is clean and intuitive — you can get a new OAuth app connected in under 5 minutes without reading any docs+137
Feature flagging is built in alongside auth, which saves setting up a separate tool like LaunchDarkly for early-stage products+118
Machine-to-machine auth for API tokens is well implemented and the docs cover it clearly+96

Cons

SDK and documentation coverage is thinner than Clerk or Auth0 — you'll hit undocumented scenarios that require support tickets

Authentication

Clerk vs Auth0

Authentication

Clerk vs Auth0 vs WorkOS

Authentication

WorkOS vs Clerk

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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

Cons

You're renting your authentication — if Clerk has an outage or shuts down, your users cannot log in, period+178
Free tier is 10,000 MAU and then it jumps to $25/mo — reasonable for real products but expensive if you're experimenting or have a high-churn user base+162
The Clerk-specific components and hooks create significant coupling — switching to another auth provider requires touching every component that handles auth state+134
Custom domain for the hosted auth pages requires a paid plan, so on the free tier users see clerk.accounts.dev in the URL which looks unprofessional+109