Why Authalla and not Clerk, Auth0, Supabase or Better Auth?

There are many great auth products in the market, both self-hosted like Better Auth and managed like Authalla. How do you choose between self-hosted vs managed auth?

If you want to self-host, you need to understand what it means. Better Auth is a great library, but when you use it, everything is on you. If it breaks, it’s on you to fix it. If there is a critical security vulnerability published, you need to fix it tonight. When your enterprise customer asks for SAML login or directory sync (SCIM), that’s on you too or when your prospect asks about the data security, you need to provide the evidence. This maintenance burden is not limited to Better Auth only, but any self-hosted solution like Keycloak or Ory Hydra too. These are the things you are choosing, when you want to self-host.

Then there are a variety of hosted auth products: Supabase, Clerk, Stytch, Auth0, WorkOS to name a few. Comparing to those, Authalla is different in three ways.

First, the pricing. Our pricing is simple, if you look at the pricing list, there is only one factor that affects your price: how big of a group of users are you serving? We think that is fair, and we don’t want to gate everything behind the feature gates that you need to unlock with money. We don’t want to be that business, we think auth can be priced transparently. We want you to understand what auth costs when you become our customer.

This is important, because the cheapest managed auth stops being the cheapest at the very point when your business starts to get traction. When you land your first enterprise customers, your auth bill will be $16k a year, not $1k a year (1). This is, because the cost grows quickly when you start adding enterprise connections. Auth providers hook you in with almost unlimited free-tier, but the cost hits you when you start serving enterprise.

We don’t want to do this. We think auth is important, but we want to keep the pricing fair. We want to work in such a way that you don’t need to start thinking switching auth provider at the very moment when your business is finally getting some traction. With Authalla, the same setup is 199 € a month, about 2 400 € a year, SSO and SCIM included up to 20k monthly active users. After this, you are already so big of a customer for us, that it makes sense to have a chat anyway, so we can discuss the pricing too. But the pricing will still be fair, that is a promise.

Second. We run our services fully in Europe. In Finland to be precise. What it means is that the service operates under EU laws, which rules things like GDPR and Data Act that forces us to care about your data and the service we offer. All the US providers need to obey these laws too when they operate in Europe, but the difference between an American company and European company is that a US law like the CLOUD Act can force them to give your data to US authorities, even from a European server. We are a Finnish company, so this does not apply to us. If you want to read more about what it means when we say we run in Europe, we wrote a separate article about it.

Third: We want to build the best product in the auth market. We have done it this far without any external funding, and we are in this for the love of making identity and access management easy and affordable. We use open standards, we don’t lock you in with proprietary features and we definitely won’t make you use our SDK to build your auth experience. We trust in openness, and we build for AI agents. We publish our API as OpenAPI spec and we have a comprehensive MCP server to let your agents do the work. We aim to provide as seamless onboarding experience there is. Currently, this means that if you connect your agent to Authalla, in 10 minutes, you have your app integrated, running in your own login.acme.com domain and sending the emails from your hello@acme.com address. All this done safely and quickly. And if any of this fails, I (Henri) will personally jump on a call and help you.

These three things is the promise that we will give you if you become our customer. We believe we can offer something different, better, than what the market currently has to offer.

Try it yourself. Sign up, connect your agent to Authalla and see if you get your app running in 10 minutes. If you don't, book a call with me and we fix it together. Sign up →

Notes:

1. WorkOS pricing, workos.com/pricing, with 5 enterprise sso + 5 directory syncs + custom domain $1349 * 12months = $16188/y, checked October 2026