Lucia vs Clerk

At a Glance

Lucia

Clerk

Lucia

No features listed.

Clerk

Lucia

Pros

Extremely lightweight and gives you full control over sessions and auth logic without any magic happening behind the scenes+148
Framework agnostic — works with SvelteKit, Astro, Nuxt, and vanilla Node.js equally well with the same core logic+134
You can audit every line of code since it's open source and the codebase is small enough to actually read+109
No external service dependency means auth works as long as your own server works — no third-party SLA to worry about+96

Cons

More boilerplate required than hosted solutions — you're responsible for building password reset, email verification, and MFA yourself

Authentication

Clerk vs Auth0

Authentication

Clerk vs Auth0 vs WorkOS

Authentication

WorkOS vs Clerk

Get the next comparison in your inbox

Weekly digest — no spam, unsubscribe anytime.

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