Comparison
Authio vs. Clerk — Clerk DX, WorkOS depth.
Drop-in components and SAML / SCIM / FGA in one platform.
The headline difference
Clerk is the best DX in B2C/SMB. Authio is that DX with enterprise depth baked in.
Clerk earned its reputation by making auth pleasant to ship. Drop in a component, get an enrollment screen, get a user profile, get an organizations panel — the developer experience is genuinely best-in-class for B2C and SMB SaaS. We learned a lot from them. Many of our component APIs deliberately echo theirs because that idiom works.
Where the two products diverge is enterprise. SAML SSO and SCIM on Clerk live on the Enterprise plan with per-connection add-ons. FGA is not a Clerk product at all. Audit-log streaming, residency tagging, and the Admin Portal flow that lets your customer’s IT team self-serve their IdP setup are all in WorkOS territory — and that is where Authio is built.
If your roadmap is “ship to design partners now, sell to the Fortune 1000 next year,” you want a platform that handles both halves of that journey. We built Authio for that arc.
Feature by feature
| Feature | Authio | Clerk |
|---|---|---|
| Drop-in <SignIn /> component | Yes — React, Next.js, Vue, React Native. | Yes — the gold standard. |
| Multi-org per user | Yes — sessions follow the user, active org is a switchable claim. | Yes (Organizations product). |
| Passwordless-first | Yes — no password store, ever. | Optional; passwords remain available. |
| Enterprise SAML 2.0 SSO | Yes — every plan. | Enterprise tier; per-connection pricing on top. |
| SCIM 2.0 directory sync | Yes — included on Starter and up. | Enterprise add-on. |
| Customer-facing Admin Portal | Yes | Yes |
| Fine-grained authorization (Zanzibar-style) | Yes — built in. | No |
| Audit log streams + partitioning | Yes — partitioned, streamable to S3 / ClickHouse / Datadog. | Basic audit log. |
| Data residency tagging (EU / IN / AU) | Yes — per project. | EU residency on Enterprise. |
| Pricing model | Per-MAU + per-connection. | Per-MAU. |
Where Clerk is a better fit.
If you are building a consumer or prosumer product where you will never need SAML SSO, where your customers are individuals (not companies), and where the “organization” concept is informal at best — Clerk is excellent and we will tell you to pick them. They have the polish, the social-login coverage, and the brand that B2C founders trust on day one.
Authio is the better fit when your buyer is a CTO, your sales motion includes a security review, and one of the first three customer questions is “do you support our IdP?” That is the moment Authio earns its keep — but our drop-in components are designed so the early phase of your product still ships in an afternoon.
One platform from your first design partner to your Fortune 500.
No second migration when you sign your enterprise round.