Clerk vs Kinde Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
Hobby
- Up to 3 dashboard seats
- Unlimited applications
- 50,000 MRU limit per app
- Up to 5 user impersonations
- APIs and prebuilt UIs for sign-up, sign-in, and user profile
- Custom domain
- Fixed, 7 day session lifetime
- Application Logs
- Machine Authentication
Pro
- Up to 3 dashboard seats
- 50,000 MRU included per app
- 1 Enterprise connection included
- Remove Clerk branding
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Satellite domains
- Custom session lifetime
- Application Logs
- SMS Authentication available
- Machine Authentication
Business
- 10 dashboard seats included
- SOC2 Report
- Enhanced dashboard roles
- Priority support
- Application Logs
Enterprise
- Annual committed use discounts
- 99.99% Uptime SLA
- Enterprise SSO for workspace
- Premium support SLA + dedicated slack channel
- Application Logs
- Log sink destinations
- HIPAA compliance available with BAA
- Onboarding & migration support
- Custom security questionnaires
Free
- Subscriptions & billing
- Email, SMS and social login
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
- B2B management with organizations
- Use your own custom domain
- Internationalization
- Customize UI with HTML/CSS or React
- Workflows / actions
- Attack protection
- Machine to machine (M2M) applications
- 2 custom roles and 10 permissions
- 10 feature flags
- 5 custom properties
- 1 webhook
- Customizable session duration
- 2 environments (production and development)
Pro
- BYO SMS provider
- API keys
- Uncapped MAU
- Uncapped organizations
- Uncapped M2M tokens
- Unlimited webhooks
- Unlimited custom roles and permissions
- Unlimited feature flags
- Unlimited custom properties
- Google Analytics integration
- Remove Kinde branding
- SOC 2 attestation report
Plus
Popular- Free enterprise SSO
- 6% MAU discount
- 0.1% transaction fee discount
- API permissions (scopes)
- Organization owned M2M apps
- 6 environments
- Domain restrictions
- Workflow preview mode
- User analysis with Hotjar
- Early access to new features
Scale
- 13% MAU discount
- 0.2% transaction fee discount
- 11 environments
- Custom domain per org
- Custom email sender per org
- Domain allowlist per org
- Auto-join based on domain per org
- Assign default roles per org
- Multi-Factor Auth (MFA) per org
- Exempt enterprise connections for MFA
- Exempt roles for MFA
- MFA workflow trigger
- SCIM (Coming soon)
- Full ISO 27001 reports
Clerk vs Kinde FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- They both start at the same price — $25/mo. The difference is in what you get at each tier.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Clerk uses hybrid pricing, while Kinde goes with usage-based. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Clerk: Clerk sits mid-to-premium in the auth-as-a-service space — more expensive than rolling your own with Auth0's free tier or using Supabase Auth, but they're betting on developer experience and B2B feature depth to justify it. They're clearly targeting VC-backed startups, hence the Stripe Atlas and YC discount pipeline. Kinde: Kinde is positioning as the developer-friendly Auth0 alternative that doesn't punish you for growing — Auth0 and Okta CIC get expensive fast at scale, and Kinde's entry price is significantly lower. They're going after the startup-to-growth-stage segment that finds Auth0 overkill and Clerk too frontend-focused.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Clerk and Kinde and let you know when something moves.