WorkOS vs. Auth0 vs. Clerk: Which should you choose?

If you’re considering adding authentication to your app, you've likely heard the advice, “Don't build your own auth system." But how do you pick the right one in a sea of authentication solutions?

Meet WorkOS, Auth0 and Clerk—three popular choices in the authentication space. They all offer essential features like email authentication and Single Sign-On (SSO), but their unique features make them stand out for different use cases.

In this article, we'll explore the distinct features of each platform. By comparing WorkOS vs. Auth0 vs. Clerk side by side, we'll help you determine which solution aligns best with your specific requirements.

WorkOS: Built for scale, loved by developers

WorkOS is a platform designed to make your application enterprise-ready with just a few lines of code. It serves as a set of building blocks for swiftly adding enterprise features to your application, providing a unified interface that abstracts numerous enterprise integrations, and supports a multitude of programming languages and environments.

WorkOS doesn’t require you to outgrow it—because it’s built for scale from the beginning. You’re not duct-taping a starter tool, nor wrangling an aging monolith. Instead, you get infrastructure that grows with your company.

Features

• Authentication: With OAuth 2.0 integrations to popular providers like Google and Microsoft, compatibility with every major IdP, and full support for custom SAML/OIDC connections, WorkOS can support any enterprise customer. You also get access to MFA, Magic Auth, passkeys, social logins, enterprise logins, and more.
• User Management: Handles user creation, authentication, and profile management with support for email verification and identity linking.
• Authorization: With support for both RBAC and Fine-Grained Authorization, WorkOS has the access control tools you need.
• Organizations: First-class support for organizations, enabling modeling of workspaces, user memberships, and roles within organizations.
• Just-In-Time (JIT) Provisioning: Automatically creates user accounts during the first authentication, streamlining onboarding.
• Directory Sync: Integrates with SCIM and HRIS systems like BambooHR and Rippling to sync user data and manage lifecycles.
• Audit Logs: Captures and exports detailed logs of authentication events and administrative actions for compliance and monitoring.
• Self-serve management: WorkOS’s Admin Portal takes the pain out of onboarding your customers’ IT teams and configuring your app to work with their identity provider.
• Radar: Detect, verify, and block harmful behavior in real time. Radar protects your app against AI bots, account abuse, credential theft, and more.
• Vault: Securely stores and manages sensitive data, such as API keys and credentials, with encryption and access controls.
• Modern APIs & SDKs: Provides RESTful APIs and SDKs for languages like Next.js, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and more, facilitating easy integration.
• Pricing: Unlike competitors who price by monthly active users, WorkOS charges a flat rate for each company you onboard — whether they bring 10 or 10,000 SSO users to your app — plus 1,000,000 monthly active users (MAU) for free.

Who is it good for?

If you're building a product that aspires to serve businesses—not just users—WorkOS is for you.

It’s not a toolkit you’ll need to rip out later. It’s not a starter pack with limitations waiting to surface. WorkOS is infrastructure—solid, scalable, and elegant—built from day one to meet the demands of enterprise software. Whether you’re signing your first B2B customer or rolling out onboarding flows for Fortune 500s, the same foundation applies. No rewrites, no workarounds.

With WorkOS, you're not duct-taping features onto a developer-friendly toy. And you're not trapped in the slow gravity well of a legacy monolith. You're using tools that feel modern, integrate cleanly, and unlock enterprise readiness as a natural extension of your growth—not a painful detour.

And unlike platforms where pricing feels like a moving target or a negotiation tactic, WorkOS gives you transparent, usage-based pricing you can actually plan around. No per-user surprises. No penalty for growth. Just clear value tied to real features.

WorkOS adapts to your architecture, respects your time, and earns your trust. It scales when you do, handles what matters (like SAML, SCIM, RBAC, and compliance), and never gets in your way.

If you're serious about building software for serious customers, WorkOS isn’t just a good fit—it’s the obvious one.

Auth0: Enterprise features at a cost

Auth0, now part of Okta, is a well-established identity management platform that offers a wide range of authentication and authorization features. It supports a wide range of protocols and can serve complex use cases. However, its unpredictable and escalating pricing structure, particularly as businesses scale, is the main reason teams migrate away from Auth0.

Features

• Authentication: Universal login, SSO, MFA, passwordless, passkeys.
• Enterprise features: SCIM, JIT, RBAC, OpenFGA.
• Security: Breached password detection, bot detection, compliance certifications.
• Pricing: Auth0's pricing is based on MAUs, and costs can escalate as your user base grows. For detailed and up-to-date pricing information, it's recommended to consult Auth0's official pricing page or contact their sales team. Here are some numbers at the time this article was written:
  • Free tier: Up to 25,000 Monthly Active Users (MAUs). Basic authentication methods, social login, and branded login pages. No custom domains, limited multi-factor authentication (MFA) options, and restricted support channels.
  • B2C plans: Essentials starts at $35/month for 500 MAUs. Professional starts at $240/month for 1,000 MAUs.
  • B2B plans: Essentials starts at $150/month for 500 MAUs with up to 3 enterprise SSO connections. Professional starts at $800/month for 500 MAUs with up to 5 enterprise SSO connections.
  • Enterprise plan: Custom pricing, based on specific requirements.

Who is it good for?

While Auth0 offers a robust set of features for authentication and authorization, teams often discover three recurring issues with Auth0:

• Pricing unpredictability: Auth0's pricing model is based on Monthly Active Users (MAUs), which can lead to significant cost increases as user bases grow. As you scale, the cost structure becomes harder to predict and manage. Additionally, essential enterprise features such as SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, and custom domains are often gated behind higher-tier plans, making them inaccessible without a substantial financial commitment.
• Customization limitations: Making Auth0 “do what you want” often requires learning its proprietary syntax and bending to platform constraints. An example is SCIM. While supported, there are a lot of limitations in place:
  • Auth0 supports SCIM provisioning primarily for specific enterprise connections, like Okta and Azure AD. Customization options are more limited.
  • SCIM configuration is done through its dashboard and Management API. While functional, it may require more manual setup and lacks some of the streamlined tools offered by other providers, like WorkOS.
• Developer experience trade-offs: Despite its reputation, integrating and maintaining Auth0 in a modern stack can feel heavy-handed compared to more developer-centric tools.

The combination of escalating costs, feature gating, and migration complexities often leads organizations to seek alternative solutions that provide more predictable pricing and greater flexibility.

Clerk: Built for simplicity, not flexibility

Clerk positions itself as an all-in-one authentication solution for modern frontend developers.

Features

• Prebuilt UI components: Drop-in React components for sign-in, sign-up, and user profile management.
• Frontend-centric SDKs: Deep integrations with modern frameworks like React, Next.js, and Remix, using hooks (useUser, useAuth, etc.).
• User management: Built-in dashboard for managing users, roles, and permissions.
• Session and JWT handling: Automatic session management with client-side and server-side helpers.
• Basic Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Clerk allows you to define roles and permissions in your app code, but it doesn’t provide a centralized, first-class RBAC system. There’s no UI or API for managing roles across organizations or enforcing complex policies.
• Limited SSO support: While Clerk supports OAuth-based login (Google, GitHub, etc.), SAML support is only available on its Enterprise plan.
• Pricing: Clerk offers a free tier with limited monthly active users and basic features, but key capabilities like SAML SSO, custom domains, and advanced security (e.g., audit logs) are locked behind the Enterprise plan, which requires custom pricing. This makes it cost-effective for small apps, but potentially expensive and restrictive for scaling or enterprise-focused products.

Who is it good for?

Clerk offers prebuilt UI components and hooks that integrate with frameworks like React, making it relatively easy to get started for small, greenfield projects. For teams focused solely on quickly adding authentication to a new app with minimal configuration, Clerk can be a fit.However, this developer-centric convenience often comes at the cost of flexibility and enterprise-readiness. Here are some of the issues teams face with Clerk:

• Limited enterprise support: Clerk lacks first-class support for enterprise identity providers or integrations with complex Identity and Access Management systems. This severely limits its utility for B2B SaaS applications targeting enterprise customers that expect SSO and automated provisioning as table stakes.
• Tight coupling to frontend frameworks: Apps that don’t use a Clerk-supported frontend framework (e.g., server-rendered apps, backend-only services, or mobile apps) can’t fully benefit from Clerk’s “drop-in” experience. This architecture makes centralized or backend-auth patterns more cumbersome, which is an issue for teams using shared authentication layers or building multiple client types.
• Vendor lock-in and portability concerns: Clerk’s proprietary approach means migrating away from their platform can be complex. Unlike standards-based platforms, you're binding your application logic and UI to Clerk’s SDKs and conventions, which can slow down engineering teams if requirements evolve.
• No abstraction from auth: Clerk emphasizes building auth “in” your app, but that also means the burden of security, compliance, and maintenance remains largely on your shoulders. By contrast, WorkOS abstracts away the complexity of enterprise auth entirely—offering a modular, standards-first platform that scales with your customer base and compliance needs.
• Reliability concerns: Developers have reported significant latency and downtime with Clerk's authentication services. Such performance issues can severely impact user experience and trust.

If you're building a B2B SaaS product with enterprise customers in mind, these limitations can be a blocker.

Choosing what’s right for you

If you're prototyping or running a personal project, a lightweight auth solution might be fine. But for teams building real businesses—especially B2B or SaaS platforms—authentication isn’t just a checkbox. It’s a core part of your product architecture.

WorkOS is purpose-built for this future. It’s the infrastructure layer that unlocks enterprise readiness without sacrificing speed or developer happiness.