We wrote this page, so read it that way. Clerk costs less than us for a lot of companies, and the table below shows where. Both have a free rung: ours is Hobby, $0, one instance per company, and it carries every sign-in method on this page except enterprise SSO, which starts on Team. Every Clerk figure here comes from their own public pricing page, read on 2026-09-04. Every Signet figure sits on our pricing page today.

What each one costs

One piece of arithmetic on Clerk's published list, because it is the question people actually ask. Pro plus four extra enterprise connections is $25 plus four times $75, which is $325 a month. Signet's Team is $299 a month at any number of connections. Below four extra connections, Clerk's list price is the lower one. Volume rates and annual billing move both sides of that, and they are on Clerk's page.

Signing a person in

Clerk ships prebuilt sign-in interface components for React, Next.js, Vue, Astro, Expo and nine other frameworks (clerk.com/docs/reference/components/overview, read 2026-09-04). Their Hobby plan does not include passkeys or multi-factor authentication. Both start on Pro (clerk.com/pricing, read 2026-09-04).

Signet serves one ready sign-in page on every instance, at /login, with sign-up and password reset beside it. It does not ship sign-in components to place inside your own app. Use that page, or keep your own screens: point the stock better-auth client at your instance and the calls you have already written keep working. Email and password, passkeys, magic links, codes, two-factor and social sign-in are all on the free Hobby rung.

If what you are buying is sign-in components to drop into your own app, buy Clerk. That is the single biggest reason not to choose us.

Enterprise SSO

Clerk supports enterprise single sign-on over SAML and OIDC, with named guides for Microsoft Entra, Google Workspace and Okta Workforce (clerk.com/docs/guides/configure/auth-strategies/enterprise-connections/overview, read 2026-09-04). Pro includes one connection per app. Clerk then charges per connection, from $75 a month down to $15 at volume (clerk.com/pricing, read 2026-09-04).

Signet includes unlimited enterprise SSO connections on Team and Business. Adding your prospect's identity provider is a configuration change, not a purchase order. Our evidence is narrower than the sentence sounds, and we say so on the product page: SAML sign-in and certificate rotation have been driven against a live Microsoft Entra tenant (10 Oct 2026), SAML in a round trip with Okta (16 Aug 2026), and OIDC against a live Entra tenant. You cannot yet make SSO the only way in for a domain. Enterprise SSO is not on Hobby. It starts on Team.

Agents and machine callers

Clerk supports three kinds of machine token: OAuth access tokens, machine-to-machine tokens for services inside your own infrastructure, and API keys your users create (clerk.com/docs/guides/development/machine-auth/overview, read 2026-09-04). Clerk bills machine tokens by usage. Their list covers 2,500 machine-to-machine token creations and 100,000 verifications a month, then charges $0.001 per creation and $0.00001 per verification. Clerk does not yet support the OAuth client credentials flow (same page, read 2026-09-04).

Signet mints an agent token that lives five minutes to an hour on one config key, names up to eight APIs it may be presented to, carries only the scopes the signed-in person approved, and reads dead at every door the moment you revoke it. There is no per-token charge, because no meter exists anywhere in the engine. Hobby carries a few short-lived agent tokens to try the story. Machine tokens and always-on agents start on Team.

Leaving

Clerk includes full data exports on every plan. Their pricing page calls them "No questions asked data exports of Clerk user data" (clerk.com/pricing, read 2026-09-04).

On Signet, every user, session and secret lives in a database dedicated to you: encrypted SQLite on Hobby, PostgreSQL from Team up. On PostgreSQL, leaving is pg_dump, pg_restore, boot. Hobby's encrypted SQLite takes one more step, in the export guide. On your own hardware you run it yourself and leaving needs nobody. On the hosted service we operate the database, so you ask and we hand you the dump.

Moving your users across

Export your users from Clerk's Dashboard under Settings, then validate the whole file against your database without writing anything:

signet import --config /etc/signet/signet.toml \
  --format clerk-csv --dry-run clerk-users.csv

Every row reports a row number, an outcome, a cause and a fix, and every Clerk column we do not consume gets its own skip receipt. Your users keep their Clerk id as their Signet id. Their existing password works on the first sign-in.

Read the failures before you plan the cutover. Rows with no password, meaning social-only and passwordless accounts, fail rather than creating a credential account we cannot honour. Phones, TOTP enrolments, OAuth grants and active sessions all need separate migration review.

Where Clerk is the better buy

• You are small and you need one enterprise connection. Clerk Pro at $25 a month includes one. Ours starts at $299.
• You want sign-in components inside your own app. We serve one sign-in page per instance, not a component kit, and we do not plan one.
• You need a compliance report today. Clerk lists a SOC 2 report on their Business plan. Our security page lists three rows we do not hold: SOC 2, ISO 27001, and a third-party penetration test. On SOC 2 it says: Type I targeted 2027; the date is set when the first enterprise deal requires it, and readiness work is priced into that deal.
• You need bot protection in the product. Clerk includes it on every plan. Our capability table does not list it, and that table says absent from it means absent from the product today.
• You need SMS as a second factor. Clerk sells it per message. We ship no SMS.
• You need an SLA outside a contract. Ours lives only inside a signed agreement.

Start

Hobby is $0, one instance per company. Signing up provisions your instance automatically, in minutes, with nobody waiting on us.

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Prices read on 2026-09-04

Review by 2026-11-03