Clerk

Drop-in authentication and user management for web apps

Clerk handles sign-up, sign-in and everything after it, as components you drop into an application rather than an auth service you wire up yourself. SignUp, SignIn, UserButton and UserProfile render prebuilt flows including social login, multi-factor authentication and account switching, and they restyle with any CSS library and deploy on your own domain. The same set covers multi-tenancy, with components for creating organizations, switching between them and managing members, roles, permissions and invitations, plus a PricingTable component for subscription billing. Machine authentication issues API keys and machine-to-machine tokens for service calls. Plans are metered per application in MRU: the free Hobby plan caps each application at 50,000, Pro includes the same 50,000 and charges two cents a month for each user beyond it, and enterprise SSO connections, satellite domains and longer log retention are priced per connection or per plan.

  • Drop-in sign-up, sign-in and user profile components
  • Restyle with any CSS library and run on your own domain
  • Multi-factor authentication and custom session lifetimes
  • Organizations, roles, permissions and invitations for B2B
  • Enterprise SSO connections, one included on the Pro plan
  • Machine authentication with API keys and M2M tokens
  • PricingTable component for subscription billing in-app
  • Application and admin logs, with retention by plan

What people are saying about Clerk

59% neutral
“I use Clerk but not the Replit-managed Clerk account! I use my own Clerk account!”
JavaBeanAI_2026 · reddit ·
“React, convex, vercel, clerk”
luis_411 · reddit ·
“im by no means an expert in clerk or your specific use case, so forgive me for some curiosities. but once you expose email login, your existing google/apple sso users are going to see that form, which you are ok with”
canarydev · reddit ·
“I am using Clerk for authentication—does anyone have any ideas on how to handle this?”
Confident-Viking4270 · reddit ·
“the server-side utm storage before the clerk redirect is the right repair. i'd add one more layer so the attribution survives every auth path, not just the current google flow”
Longjumping_Boot1024 · reddit ·
“Clerk stripping UTMs is such a pain, we had the exact same thing happen last year. Took us forever to even notice because the numbers looked fine at a glance, just slightly off in ways that didn't trigger any alarms.”
No-Preparation8552 · reddit ·
“Turns out Clerk (our auth provider) was stripping our UTM parameters during the signup flow, so we couldn't actually trace signups back to the right campaigns. That's fixed now too, but man, attribution debugging is a rabbit hole.”
Born-Buy7123 · reddit ·
“Phase that actually stings is everything your saas silently leans upon. Sendgrid for email, auth0/clerk for auth and a managed postgres or stripe webhooks calls back to your own api.”
TangeloOk9486 · reddit ·
“> How many paid auth providers let you export user password hashes so that you can seamlessly migrate to another vendor, if you want to?Clerk is surely one of the biggest and allows you to do this.”
MrAlex94 · hn ·
“Clerk is awful”
Illustrious-Film4018 · reddit ·
“clerk for auth - much easier + cheaper than supabase”
fcuk112 · reddit ·
“Your clerk is in development mode… pricing and solution buttons don’t work on mobile at least.”
CartographerIcy2130 · reddit ·
“You can use tools like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor, Claude Code, Supabase, Firebase, Flatlogic, Clerk, Stripe, Vercel, Render, Railway, Bubble, Webflow, Framer, Retool, Appsmith, n8n, Zapier, Make, PostHog, Sentry, and others to get from idea to something that looks like a real product much faster than before.”
Few-Garlic2725 · reddit ·
“I had hopes for clerk.dev, but unfortunately the auth business optimizes for deep lock-in + steadily escalating prices.After working through a few transitions to/from Auth0 that is something I never ever want to do again at scale.”
dkobia · hn ·
“Overall, I'm quite surprised how well it went.”
Next-Calligrapher381 · reddit ·
“the migration can look fine at login while existing accounts lose access to their data if the old replit id isn’t linked correctly to the new clerk id. i’d test a few real account paths against a database copy first, then move one protected route at a time.”
WoodenBar2113 · reddit ·
“I would keep auth verification on the API and have Clerk issue the token, then the API checks it and decides which user the request belongs to. dont trust a user id sent by the app by itself.”
Suitable-Strain-9056 · reddit ·
“If you don't pay the $100 a month tier then you will just have access to Replit controlled Clerk which means you have no access and is not great on a production app since the login splash screen says logging onto Replit instead your app/webpage.”
stall022 · reddit ·
“Keep Server Actions on the web side, expose a proper API for mobile, and validate the Clerk token server-side to derive the user. A monorepo with shared types/API contracts can work really well too.”
Cache_Sync42 · reddit ·
“Currently i am using clerk with student benefits”
SneakyMndl · reddit ·
“Convex is handling the database because I like the real-time sync, Clerk is handling auth because it’s easy to get running, and Linq is what I’m using to actually send and receive iMessages.”
Grand_Art_6861 · reddit ·
“Auth and payments are exactly where boilerplate services earn their keep, Clerk or Supabase for auth and Stripe's prebuilt checkout will save more time than rolling your own for a first launch”
Technical-Fault9989 · reddit ·
“@konig0000 for speed and simplicity I’d go with Clerk”
Taniyatweets_ · x ·
“Personally, I dislike having my auth bound to an external third party service. In that case, I prefer Better Auth.”
3sh_aan · reddit ·
“🟢 Clerk — Easy”
yashmp2004 · x ·
See what people previously said about Clerk