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

If you're adding authentication to your application, you've likely heard the advice: "Don't build your own auth." But with so many authentication solutions available, how do you choose the right one?

Meet WorkOS, Better Auth, and Clerk: three popular approaches to solving authentication, each with distinct philosophies:

• WorkOS is designed to make your application enterprise-ready with minimal effort.
• Better Auth is an open-source TypeScript framework that puts you in complete control of your auth infrastructure.
• Clerk is a platform that emphasizes beautiful pre-built components and rapid integration.

Each ones handles different features and their ideal use cases differ significantly. In this article, we'll explore what makes each platform unique and help you determine which solution aligns best with your specific requirements.

WorkOS: Built for B2B, designed for scale

WorkOS is a developer platform designed specifically for B2B SaaS applications. Rather than being a general-purpose authentication service, WorkOS focuses on the features that enterprise customers demand (SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and user management) and makes them dead simple to implement. WorkOS will give you all the building blocks you need to grow fast and focus on building your product and customer base.

Core features

• ‍Authentication: WorkOS provides comprehensive authentication with OAuth 2.0 integrations to popular providers like Google and Microsoft, compatibility with every major identity provider (IdP), and full support for custom SAML/OIDC connections. You get access to MFA, Magic Auth, passkeys, social logins, enterprise logins, and more: everything you need to support both consumer and enterprise authentication patterns.‍
• User management: WorkOS handles user creation, authentication, and profile management with built-in support for email verification and identity linking. AuthKit, WorkOS's fully-customizable user management solution, provides a complete authentication system with 1,000,000 monthly active users free.‍
• Authorization: With support for both Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA), WorkOS gives you the access control tools you need as your application grows from simple role checks to complex permission models.‍
• Organizations: First-class support for organizations enables you to model workspaces, user memberships, and roles within organizations; essential for multi-tenant B2B applications.‍
• Directory Sync (SCIM): Automatically sync user and group data from your customers' identity providers like Okta, Azure AD, and Google Workspace. When IT admins provision or deprovision users in their system, those changes automatically reflect in your application.‍
• Admin Portal: WorkOS's Admin Portal removes the friction from customer onboarding. Your customers' IT teams can configure SSO connections and directory sync themselves through a self-service interface—no developer involvement required. This dramatically reduces support burden and accelerates enterprise deals.‍
• Audit Logs: Capture and export detailed logs of authentication events and administrative actions for compliance and monitoring. Essential for enterprise customers with SOC 2, HIPAA, or other compliance requirements.‍
• Radar: Detect, verify, and block harmful behavior in real time. Radar protects your application against AI bots, account abuse, credential theft, and more with intelligent threat detection.
• Vault: Securely store and manage sensitive customer data like API keys, credentials, and secrets with encryption and fine-grained access controls. Vault provides a unified interface for handling sensitive information across all your enterprise customers.
• Feature Flags: Control feature rollouts and manage product experiments with organization-level targeting. Enable or disable features for specific customers or user segments without deploying new code, making it easy to test enterprise features before general availability.
• Domain verification: Allow your customers to verify domain ownership for features like automatic email-based organization joining and enhanced security controls. Essential for B2B scenarios where users with company email addresses should automatically join their organization.
• Pipes: Enable your customers to connect their third-party accounts to your application. With Pipes, you can easily integrate with popular services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and many more without managing OAuth flows, token refresh logic, or credential storage.
• Widgets: Embed pre-built, customizable UI components directly into your application for common enterprise workflows, for example a Users Management Widget that provides a UI for inviting, removing and editing users.‍
• Modern APIs & SDKs: WorkOS provides RESTful APIs and SDKs for languages like Next.js, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and more, making integration straightforward regardless of your tech stack. With the WorkOS CLI you can have auth added to your app automatically using AI. Run one command, the CLI handles the rest: framework detection, SDK installation, route creation, environment setup, and build validation.

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.

• User Management (AuthKit): Free for first 1M MAUs, then $2,500 per additional 1M MAUs
• SSO: $125/month per connection
• Directory Sync: $125/month per directory
• Admin Portal: $100/month
• Audit Logs: $100/month
• Radar: Free for first 1,000 checks, then $100/month per 50K checks.

This pricing model is specifically designed for B2B SaaS companies selling to other businesses, where each customer organization might have hundreds or thousands of users. Use the calculator to predict exactly your costs.

Ideal for

WorkOS is perfect for B2B SaaS companies that need to become enterprise ready quickly. If you're selling to companies, and those companies are asking for SSO, SCIM provisioning, or audit logs, WorkOS is built specifically for your use case.

Better Auth: Self-hosted authentication library

Better Auth takes a fundamentally different approach to authentication. Rather than being a hosted service, it's an open-source TypeScript framework that runs directly in your application. This means your user data lives in your own database, you have complete control over your infrastructure, and you pay nothing for the authentication library itself.

Core features

• ‍Framework agnostic: Better Auth works seamlessly with all popular JavaScript frameworks including React, Vue, Svelte, Astro, Solid, Next.js, Nuxt, TanStack Start, and Hono.‍
• Email & password authentication: Built-in support for traditional email/password authentication with session and account management, password reset flows, and email verification.‍
• Social Sign-On: Allow users to sign in with their social accounts, including GitHub, Google, Discord, Twitter, and more through built-in OAuth providers and a generic OAuth plugin for custom providers.‍
• Two-Factor authentication: Secure user accounts with 2FA including TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) with minimal configuration.‍
• Multi-tenant support: The organization plugin provides comprehensive features for building multi-tenant applications, including organizations, members, teams, roles, and invitation workflows with access control.‍
• Plugin ecosystem: Extend functionality with official and community plugins. Better Auth's architecture is modular—you only include what you need. Plugins can contribute across the entire stack: data model, backend API, and frontend hooks.‍
• Type safety: Full TypeScript support with auto-generated types for users, sessions, and database schemas. When used with ORMs like Drizzle or Prisma, you get end-to-end type safety.‍
• Database flexibility: Store authentication data in your database of choice (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, etc.) using your preferred ORM. Better Auth integrates directly with your database connection pool.‍
• Self-hosted: No separate infrastructure to deploy or maintain. Better Auth runs as part of your application, with all user data staying in your database.

Pricing

Better Auth is free and open source. You pay for your own infrastructure costs (database, hosting, etc.).

What Better Auth doesn't provide

While Better Auth gives you control, it comes with significant tradeoffs:

• ‍No enterprise SSO: Better Auth doesn't support SAML or OIDC out of the box. If your customers ask for SSO with their Okta or Azure AD, you're on your own to build it—a months-long engineering project that most teams dramatically underestimate.‍
• No directory sync (SCIM): Automatic user provisioning from your customers' identity providers isn't supported. You'll need to build this yourself if enterprise customers require it, adding weeks or months to your roadmap.‍
• You own the security burden: Every security vulnerability, patch, and update is your responsibility. While the framework provides good defaults, you're accountable for keeping dependencies updated, monitoring for breaches, and responding to security incidents. For a small team, this operational overhead can be significant.‍
• No compliance certifications: Unlike hosted services, you can't leverage a vendor's SOC 2, HIPAA, or ISO certifications. You'll need to get your own certifications and undergo your own audits, which is expensive and time-consuming.‍
• Infrastructure complexity: You're responsible for scaling, monitoring, uptime, and disaster recovery. Need to handle 10,000 concurrent login attempts? That's your problem to solve. Database backup strategy? You'll need to build it.‍
• No audit logging infrastructure: While you can log events to your database, you don't get the enterprise-grade audit log infrastructure that customers expect, including tamper-proof logs, long-term retention, and compliance-ready exports.‍
• Support is DIY: When something breaks at 2 AM, you're reading GitHub issues and Discord channels, not calling enterprise support. For business-critical authentication, this can be a liability.

Ideal for

Better Auth is ideal for teams that want complete control over their authentication infrastructure and data. It's particularly well-suited for:

• Startups that want to avoid per-user costs as they scale and have engineering resources to maintain auth infrastructure.
• Teams building on TypeScript-first tech stacks with strong DevOps capabilities.
• Developers who value owning their entire stack and have time to manage it.
• Applications where authentication is tightly integrated with business logic.

Not ideal for: Teams without dedicated infrastructure expertise, B2B SaaS companies selling to enterprises (who will demand SSO/SCIM), or companies that need to move fast without building foundational features.

Clerk: Component-first authentication

Clerk emphasizes rapid integration with pre-built, customizable UI components.

Core features

• ‍Pre-built UI Components: Clerk provides beautiful, production-ready components for sign-up, sign-in, user profiles, and organization management. These components are fully styled out of the box but highly customizable to match your brand.‍
• Social authentication: Seamless integration with 30+ social providers including Google, GitHub, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.‍
• Multi-Factor Authentication: Built-in support for SMS and email-based MFA with user self-service settings that are automatically enforced during sign-in.‍
• Organization management: Comprehensive B2B features including organization creation, member management, roles and permissions, domain verification, and invitation workflows. Users can belong to multiple organizations and switch between them seamlessly.‍
• User management dashboard: A polished admin dashboard for managing users, viewing sessions, handling support tickets, and monitoring authentication events.‍
• Session management: Advanced session controls including multi-session support (users can be logged in on multiple devices), device tracking, and granular session configuration.‍
• SDKs & Integrations: First-class SDKs for React, Next.js, Remix, Gatsby, and other popular frameworks, along with backend SDKs for Node.js, Go, and more.

Pricing

• Free Plan: Up to 10,000 Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and 100 Monthly Active Organizations (MAOs).
• Pro Plan: $20/month base + $0.02 per MAU beyond 10,000
  • Includes MFA, SAML authentication, unlimited social providers.
  • SAML connections are metered (additional cost per connection).
  • Enterprise connections (SAML/OIDC): Additional cost per connection.
• Business Plan: Starting at $250/month
  • Includes 4+ dashboard seats, SOC 2/HIPAA compliance artifacts.
  • Volume discounts available.
• Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing
  • SLA guarantees, dedicated support, custom contracts.

Note that add-ons can significantly impact pricing. Enterprise SSO (SAML), advanced administration features, and additional dashboard seats may incur extra monthly costs.

Where Clerk falls short

Despite its strengths in developer experience, Clerk has notable limitations for B2B applications:

• ‍No directory sync (SCIM): Clerk doesn't support SCIM provisioning, which is a dealbreaker for many enterprise customers. When your customer's IT admin adds or removes employees in their identity provider, those changes won't automatically sync to your application. You'll need to manually manage user lifecycle or build your own SCIM implementation.‍
• Limited admin portal: While Clerk has a nice dashboard for your team, it doesn't provide a self-service portal for your customers' IT admins to configure SSO and manage their own settings. This means more support tickets and slower enterprise onboarding.‍
• Pricing complexity and escalation: Despite recent improvements, Clerk's pricing can become unpredictable as you scale. Each SAML connection is metered, and add-ons stack up quickly. A company with 50,000 MAUs and 10 enterprise SSO connections can face surprisingly high monthly bills. According to community feedback, costs "escalate quickly" beyond the generous free tier.‍
• Per-MAU pricing for B2B: Charging per monthly active user makes less sense for B2B SaaS. If you onboard a customer with 5,000 employees, that's $100/month just for that one customer's users ($0.02 × 5,000), plus SSO connection fees.‍
• MAO limitations bite hard: The 100 Monthly Active Organization limit on free and Pro plans sounds generous until you realize it counts every organization with even a single active user. For B2B apps, this limit arrives faster than expected, forcing an upgrade or additional per-organization charges.‍
• Audit logging gaps: Clerk's audit capabilities are limited compared to enterprise-grade solutions. You don't get the comprehensive, tamper-proof audit trails with long-term retention that enterprise customers require for compliance.‍
• Dashboard seat costs: Need more than 3 admin users? That's $10/month per additional seat. For growing teams, this adds up. WorkOS provides unlimited admin access.‍
• React-first bias: While Clerk supports multiple frameworks, it's clearly optimized for React and Next.js. If you're using other frameworks, the experience isn't as polished, and you may find yourself working around React-centric assumptions.‍
• Features locked behind add-ons: User impersonation, enhanced administration, custom roles, domain restrictions, automatic invitations—features that should be standard in a user management platform are gated behind separate $100/month add-ons.

Ideal for

Clerk excels for teams that prioritize developer experience and want to ship authentication quickly:

• Startups that want to minimize time-to-market and will stay under 10K MAUs for a while.
• Teams building with React/Next.js who value pre-built components.
• Projects where the free tier (10K MAUs) covers early growth.

Not ideal for: Enterprise-focused B2B SaaS that needs SCIM, companies with unpredictable user growth (pricing uncertainty), applications requiring comprehensive audit logging, or teams that need extensive customization beyond what pre-built components offer.

Feature comparison

Making your decision

The right authentication solution depends on your specific needs, but the gaps in Better Auth and Clerk become apparent quickly when building for enterprise customers:

Choose WorkOS if:

• You're building a B2B SaaS application selling to other businesses.
• Enterprise customers are asking (or will ask) for SSO, SCIM, or audit logs.
• You want predictable pricing that doesn't explode when you land a 10,000-user customer.
• You need features like directory sync and self-service admin portals without building them yourself.
• You don't want to spend 6+ months building enterprise features when you could be building product.
• You're serious about scaling to serve enterprise customers.
• You value your engineering team's time too much to have them building auth infrastructure.

WorkOS is laser-focused on making B2B applications enterprise ready. If that's your use case, the alternatives simply don't compare.

Choose Better Auth if:

• You require complete data ownership and control (and have the team to manage it).
• You're building on a TypeScript/JavaScript tech stack with strong DevOps capabilities.
• You have months to dedicate to building enterprise SSO and SCIM from scratch.
• You have the technical capability and bandwidth to manage security updates, scaling, and monitoring.
• Your customers won't ask for enterprise features, or you're willing to say "no" to those deals.
• You have the resources to get your own compliance certifications.
• You value open source and complete control more than speed to market.
• Your use case is genuinely unique enough that a framework makes more sense than a platform.

The reality: Most teams that choose Better Auth underestimate the ongoing maintenance burden and overestimate their ability to build enterprise features. If "we'll add SSO later" is part of your thinking, you're setting yourself up for painful technical debt when a major prospect asks for it.

Choose Clerk if:

• You're building a consumer application with no enterprise sales plans.
• You'll stay comfortably under 50K MAUs and won't need many organizations.
• You're using React or Next.js and value pre-built components above all else.
• Your customers will never ask for SCIM directory sync.
• You're willing to pay per-MAU pricing that can scale unpredictably.
• You need to ship fast and enterprise requirements are definitely not on your roadmap.

The reality: Many teams start with Clerk, then realize they need to migrate when enterprise prospects ask for features Clerk doesn't offer. Migration during a sales cycle is painful. If there's any chance you'll sell to enterprises, choose accordingly from the start.

The hidden costs of choosing wrong

Picking the wrong authentication platform isn't just a technical decision; it's a business risk:

• Lost deals: When a prospect asks for SSO or SCIM and you can't deliver, you lose the deal. Competitors with enterprise features win.
• Migration hell: Switching auth providers mid-growth is incredibly painful. You're touching every part of your application while trying not to break existing users.
• Opportunity cost: Every month your team spends building auth features is a month not spent on your actual product. How much revenue could you have generated with that time?
• Support burden: Without self-service admin portals, every enterprise customer needs hand-holding for setup. This doesn't scale.

WorkOS eliminates these risks. You get enterprise features immediately, pricing that makes sense for B2B, and the confidence that you won't need to migrate as you grow.

The bottom line

Authentication isn't one-size-fits-all, but the tradeoffs are clear:

Better Auth gives you complete control and zero vendor lock-in, but it also gives you all the work. You're responsible for implementing enterprise SSO (months of work), handling security updates, managing infrastructure, and explaining to prospects why you don't have SOC 2 certification. For teams with deep infrastructure expertise and time to build, it can work. For most B2B SaaS companies racing to close enterprise deals, it's a costly distraction from building actual product features.

Clerk delivers beautiful UI and rapid integration, but it's designed for consumer apps, not enterprise software. The moment a customer asks for SCIM provisioning, you're stuck. The per-MAU pricing model means a single large customer can blow up your authentication costs. The free tier is a great way to start, but the lack of enterprise features means you'll eventually need to migrate anyway; often at the worst possible time, when you're trying to close your first enterprise deal.

WorkOS is purpose-built for making B2B SaaS applications enterprise ready. You get SSO that works with any IdP (not metered per connection), SCIM directory sync that customers expect, self-service admin portals that reduce your support burden, and comprehensive audit logs for compliance. The pricing model is also designed for B2B. You don't outgrow WorkOS; it scales from your first enterprise customer to your thousandth.

If you're building consumer software or a simple internal tool, Better Auth or Clerk might suffice. But if you're building B2B SaaS and you know enterprise customers are in your future, you have two choices: spend 6-12 months building enterprise features yourself, or add them in an afternoon with WorkOS. Remember that the authentication platform you choose today determines which customers you can win tomorrow.

The companies winning enterprise deals aren't doing it with DIY auth or consumer-focused platforms. They're using purpose-built infrastructure designed for B2B from day one.

Want to see how fast you can become enterprise-ready? Get started with WorkOS and add the features your enterprise customers are asking for (SSO, SCIM, audit logs, and more) in minutes, not months.