CREA.MBAAn honest comparison of Better Auth and Clerk for a production SaaS in 2026 — pricing, vendor lock-in, self-hosting, and developer experience.
Clerk gives you authentication as a service: drop-in React components, a hosted user dashboard, and you're live in an afternoon. Better Auth gives you authentication as a library: it runs inside your Next.js app, against your own database, and you own every row.
Both get you a login form. The difference shows up months later — when you read the invoice, and when you try to leave.
This guide compares them without marketing: where Clerk genuinely wins, where Better Auth wins, and how to decide for a SaaS you intend to run for years.
At the "I need users to log in" level, both are excellent. The decision isn't about a feature list — it's about ownership, the cost curve, and lock-in.
1. Time to first login. Clerk's and are genuinely polished: a styled, accessible, localized auth UI in minutes, plus a hosted dashboard to manage users, sessions and bans without building a single admin screen.
2. You don't run anything. No auth tables to migrate, no session store to operate, no security patches to chase. Clerk handles SOC 2, bot protection and breach detection. For a solo founder who wants zero auth ops, that's real value.
3. Pre-built flows that would cost you days. Org invitations with email, device management, impersonation, waitlists — all there, with UI. Each one built by hand is a day off your product.
4. Compliance paperwork. If a customer asks for a DPA or a security questionnaire, Clerk has the answers a vendor expects.
1. It's free and open source. No per-user pricing, ever. You pay for the database and server you already run. Auth stops being a line item that grows with your success.
2. You own the data. Users, sessions and accounts live in your Postgres, next to the rest of your domain. You can join user to subscription in one query. With Clerk, your users live in Clerk — you sync.
3. No vendor lock-in. Better Auth is a dependency, not a platform. Stop liking it and you migrate within your own DB. There's no "export users from a third party and rebuild sessions" project.
4. Type safety from your own schema. auth.api.getSession() returns types inferred from the plugins you enabled — session.activeOrganizationId is typed because you turned on the organization plugin.
5. SaaS features as free plugins: twoFactor(), organization(), admin(), passkey(), magicLink(). The features Clerk gates behind paid tiers, you enable with a line of config.
This is where the decision usually gets made. Clerk bills per Monthly Active User: a free tier (around 10,000 MAU at the time of writing), then a monthly base plus a fee per MAU beyond it, with several features (removing Clerk branding, advanced org controls, enhanced security) on paid plans.
The structural point matters more than today's exact numbers: with Clerk, your auth bill grows with your success. 50,000 active users is a great problem to have — and a four-figure annual auth bill. With Better Auth, 50,000 users cost roughly the same as 500: a bit more database.
Do the math for your 12-month projection, not for today. Auth is cheap when you have no users; the question is what it costs when you win.
Ask one question: if this provider doubled its price or shut down, how long is my migration?
Lock-in isn't evil — you pay for convenience. Just price it honestly.
Pick Clerk if: you want auth live this afternoon with zero ops; you're pre-revenue or low-MAU and value speed over cost; you don't want to own auth security/compliance; polished pre-built UI beats data ownership for you.
Pick Better Auth if: you're building a SaaS to run for years; per-MAU pricing at scale scares you; you want users in your own database with no sync; you want self-hosting and no lock-in; you're comfortable owning a bit of infrastructure.
Clerk sells you time today. Better Auth gives you ownership for the life of the product. For a weekend prototype or a pre-revenue MVP, Clerk's polish is hard to beat. For a SaaS you plan to scale and keep, paying per active user for something you can run yourself — against your own data — is a tax that compounds.
The honest question isn't "which is better?" It's "do I want auth to be a vendor I rent, or a part of my codebase I own?"
If you land on Better Auth, CREA.MBA ships it already wired: email/password + OAuth, 2FA with TOTP and backup codes, organizations with roles and invitations, and an admin panel with impersonation and bans — all on Better Auth, in your own Postgres, with no per-user pricing. The decision in this article comes pre-made, and the day of integration work behind it is already done.
Subscribe for more tutorials and tips on building products with AI