Clerk vs Authalla
Clerk’s components are lovely and their free tier is enormous: 50,000 users. What matters more than the size is what the free tier leaves out. If you are building passwordless, you are on a paid plan from your very first user.
Read from Clerk’s own public pages on . Prices change; check theirs before you decide.
| What | Clerk | Authalla |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | Clerk, Inc., San Francisco. Venture-backed. | Authalla Oy, Finland. Owned by founders. No outside investors, no parent company. |
| Where your users’ data sits | United States. Their security page lists regional data residency as not offered, and transfers rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. | Hetzner in Helsinki, Finland. Sign-in email goes through Brevo (France), which stores it in Belgium. |
| Passkeys | Not in the free plan. Passkeys, MFA, enterprise connections and removing Clerk branding all need a paid plan. | The default way to sign in, in every plan including the free one. |
| Free tier | 50,000 “monthly retained users” — their own metric: a user counts once they return 24 hours after signing up. | 1,000 monthly active users, with every feature. |
| Enterprise SSO | The first connection comes with Pro; after that $75 per connection per month in the 2–15 band, less above. | Included in every plan. No per-connection fee. |
| This scenario: 10,000 users, 3 SSO connections, custom domain, no vendor branding | $175 a month ($25 for Pro plus $75 for each enterprise connection beyond the first). | €99 a month. |
| Who answers when it breaks | Support plans, escalating with spend. | The founders. Our phone numbers are on this site. |
A free tier without the thing you came for
Clerk’s free plan does not include passkeys. It also leaves out MFA, enterprise connections and removing Clerk’s branding from your sign-in. So the 50,000 users are free in the sense that matters least: if passkeys are how your product signs people in, you are paying from user number one.
Compare the shape rather than the headline. Our free plan stops at 1,000 monthly active users, and it contains the entire product: passkeys, enterprise SSO, SCIM, custom domains, white-label, audit logs. Support depth is the only difference between our tiers. So ask what each one costs once your product needs passkeys, an enterprise connection or your own domain, rather than whose free tier holds more users.
Counting users their way
Clerk bills by “monthly retained users”, which they define as users who come back at least 24 hours after signing up. It is a defensible metric, since you are not charged for one-time visitors. It is also their own, so your bill cannot be checked against anybody else’s numbers, including ours.
We bill by monthly active users, the ordinary meaning, and the tiers are €0 to 1,000, €99 to 10,000 and €199 to 20,000. The number on the page is the number.
Where the data lives, and who can ask for it
Clerk’s own security page lists regional data residency as not offered: user data sits in the United States, with transfers under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. That framework is in force and is under appeal at the EU’s top court. We do not depend on it either way: Authalla is a Finnish company with no US parent, and your users’ identity data is stored on EU-owned servers in Finland. The proof is on our European page and subprocessor list.
Set up by your agent, backed by the founders
Connect our MCP server and your coding agent configures the tenant, clients, domains and branding while you describe what you want, with no API key to paste into a .env file. When you need help, the people who wrote it answer. The full scenario priced across seven vendors is on our pricing page.