What is Clerk used for?

Clerk is an authentication and user management service with prebuilt UI components and SDKs for sign-in, organizations and billing in web apps. It is a good fit for adding login to a Next.js app quickly, building a B2B app with team workspaces and customizing auth screens to match branding.

Is Clerk open source?

No. Clerk is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Clerk include SuperTokens, Logto and Hanko.

What are some alternatives to Clerk?

Clerk competes with Auth0, Stytch and WorkOS. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Clerk alternatives.

Clerk: features, pricing and alternatives

About Clerk

Clerk provides full-stack authentication and user management for applications. Instead of building sign-in, sign-up and account screens from scratch, developers add Clerk's prebuilt UI components and SDKs, and the hosted service handles users and sessions. The documentation promises a complete user management setup in minutes.

Beyond basic authentication, the platform covers organization management for multi-tenant apps, billing management, session management and a hosted Account Portal. Components, email templates and other parts of the user experience can be restyled to match an app's branding. SDKs are listed for a broad range of frameworks and languages, including Next.js, React, Expo, Remix, Vue, Nuxt, Express, Go, Python, Ruby and Rust, and there is a command line tool and agent skills to help with setup.

Clerk is a proprietary, hosted service with a dashboard, documentation and a pricing page. Teams that want to own the identity layer themselves would need a different, self-hosted option.

Key features

Prebuilt sign-in and sign-up components
User and session management
Organizations for multi-tenant apps
Billing management
Hosted Account Portal
SDKs for many frameworks

Good fit for

→Adding login to a Next.js app quickly
→Building a B2B app with team workspaces
→Customizing auth screens to match branding

Tags: authentication; user-management; sso; organizations; nextjs; react; saas; identity

Clerk: questions and answers

What is Clerk used for?: Clerk is an authentication and user management service with prebuilt UI components and SDKs for sign-in, organizations and billing in web apps. It is a good fit for adding login to a Next.js app quickly, building a B2B app with team workspaces and customizing auth screens to match branding.
Is Clerk free?: Yes. Clerk has a free plan.
Is Clerk open source?: No. Clerk is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Clerk include SuperTokens, Logto and Hanko.
What are some alternatives to Clerk?: Clerk competes with Auth0, Stytch and WorkOS. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Clerk alternatives.