European Alternatives to Clerk
Looking for a European alternative to Clerk? Clerk's standard terms are made with Clerk, Inc. and governed by the law of Delaware, and its privacy policy says information may be transferred, processed and stored anywhere in the world, including the United States. Its pricing page lists a free Hobby plan up to 50,000 MRU per app and a Pro plan from $20 per month billed annually, with further single sign-on connections charged at $75 per month each.
The European tools below put the user table with a vendor in the EU, the UK or Switzerland, and several can be self-hosted, so account data does not have to cross the Atlantic at all.
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA, the UK, Switzerland or Israel, and processes customer data in Europe or Israel. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
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10 European Alternatives to Clerk
Hanko
Passkey-first login and user management from Kiel
cidaas
Customer and workforce IAM with list prices on the page
Authress
Login plus resource-level permissions behind one API
Curity
Standards-heavy OAuth and OpenID Connect identity server
Keycloak
Open-source SSO and identity brokering server under the CNCF
Nevis Security
Zurich CIAM platform built for banks and insurers
Corbado
Managed passkey layer that sits next to your existing IdP
Futurae
Strong customer authentication and fraud signals from Zurich
Signicat
Nordic eID, passkey and mobile authentication from Trondheim
Idura
One integration for European national eID logins
Key takeaways
- Clerk's Standard Terms are made with Clerk, Inc. and governed by Delaware law, and its privacy policy allows storage anywhere in the world including the United States.
- Clerk's Pro plan costs $20 a month billed annually and includes one SSO connection, with each extra connection at $75 a month.
- Hanko, cidaas, Authress, Curity and Keycloak are the five tools on this page that can replace Clerk as the login system of a web product.
- Corbado, Futurae and Idura add one layer, passkeys, strong authentication or national eIDs, and do not hold the user table.
- Keycloak and Curity run on infrastructure you choose, so the account data never reaches a vendor-operated cloud.
Why people leave Clerk
Clerk sells the part of an application that every visitor meets first: sign-up, sign-in, sessions and the user table, delivered as prebuilt components and an API. For a team building on React or Next.js it is quick to adopt, and its pricing page lists a free Hobby plan with up to 50,000 monthly retained users per app. The reason to look at alternatives is rarely the product. It is who holds the account data and under which law.
Clerk's Standard Terms of 1 October 2026 are made with Clerk, Inc. and governed by the law of the State of Delaware, with arbitration in San Francisco for customers based in the United States. Its privacy policy says information may be transferred, processed and stored anywhere in the world, including the United States. The Data Processing Addendum is part of the agreement, so the paperwork exists, but the vendor and the governing law stay American.
Buyers in Europe usually add a second reason that has nothing to do with law. The Pro plan includes one SSO connection and charges $75 a month for each further one, and the multi-factor feature sits behind Pro as well. A product that sells to businesses sees the enterprise-login line of its bill grow with every customer that brings its own identity provider.
- The contract is American The agreement names Clerk, Inc., Delaware law governs it, and the privacy policy allows storage anywhere in the world. A European company can sign that, and many do, but the data protection officer has to document the transfer. A vendor in Germany, Sweden or Switzerland, or software you run yourself, replaces that paperwork with a contract under European law.
- Enterprise SSO is billed per connection On the pricing page of 30 October 2026 the Pro plan at $20 a month, billed annually, includes one SSO connection and one directory sync connection. Every additional SSO connection costs $75 a month, and directory sync connections are charged at the same rate from 1 January 2027. A B2B product with forty enterprise customers on SAML pays for that growth line by line.
- Several controls sit above the free tier The Hobby plan has a fixed seven-day session lifetime and one day of application logs. A custom session lifetime and multi-factor authentication are listed from Pro, and the SOC 2 report is listed from the Business plan at $250 a month, billed annually. Teams that need those controls from day one pay for the tier, not for the users.
- The unit of billing is the retained user Clerk counts a monthly retained user, someone who returns at least 24 hours after signing up. Above the 50,000 included per app, each extra one costs $0.02 a month, falling to $0.018 above 100,000. It is a fair unit for consumer sign-ups, but it makes the bill depend on retention, which is hard to forecast before launch.
What you have to replace, not just match
Moving off Clerk means replacing more than a login form. The user table with its identifiers, the session tokens your backend verifies, the prebuilt sign-in and profile components, the organisation model with roles and invitations, and the webhooks that keep your own database in sync are all Clerk's.
Each of them has an equivalent among the European tools, but not every tool covers all of them. Hanko supplies components and sessions, Keycloak supplies realms and brokering, and Authress supplies the permission model, so the first step is deciding which of these your product really uses.
Passwords are the awkward part. Clerk's pricing page lists passwords among its features, and a user table with password hashes cannot simply be copied to another vendor unless the hash format is supported on arrival.
Plan for a staged migration in which users with passwords are asked to set a passkey or an email code on the first login at the new provider. Social login connections need new client credentials at Google, GitHub or Apple, and redirect URLs change with them.
Finally there is what Clerk bundles beyond authentication: the Billing add-on at 0.7% of billing volume, the Protect checks priced per check, and impersonation for support staff. If you use these, the European replacement is a combination of tools rather than a single swap, and the cost comparison has to include the pieces you will now build or buy separately.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Hanko | Kiel, Germany | Free tier / from €99 per month | EU (Germany) |
| #2 | cidaas | Wimsheim, Germany | Customer IAM: Essentials €699/month (1,000 users) / Standard €1,399/month (5,000 users) / Pro €2,999/month / Enterprise on request; Workforce IAM €4.50 per user/month; 20% off yearly; VAT treatment not stated | EU (Germany) |
| #3 | Authress | Winterthur, Switzerland | See website (pricing page is rendered client-side) | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #4 | Curity | Stockholm, Sweden | Community Edition free / Standard, Enterprise and Token Handler editions on a flat annual subscription, price on request | EU (Sweden) |
| #5 | Keycloak | London, United Kingdom | Free and open source | Self-hosted; project governance is international |
| #6 | Nevis Security | Zurich, Switzerland | Not published on the pages read | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #7 | Corbado | Munich, Germany | Custom pricing, based on usage, deployment and support (pricing call) | EU (Germany) |
| #8 | Futurae | Zurich, Switzerland | Integrated plan CHF 0.25 per monthly active user (1,000 to 10,000 MAU); custom plans above | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #9 | Signicat | Trondheim, Norway | Custom pricing | EEA, not EU (Norway) |
| #10 | Idura | Copenhagen, Denmark | Pricing pages exist for Verify, Signatures and Age Verification; amounts not read. Free testing offered | EU (Denmark) |
How each alternative compares to Clerk
Best for: Small teams that want embeddable login components and a vendor in Germany
Hanko targets the same buyer as Clerk: a developer who wants a login flow running in an afternoon. It ships web components called Hanko Elements, a REST API and JWT sessions that any backend can verify, with guides for Next.js, Nuxt and SvelteKit. The difference is the default method. Where Clerk presents a form with several options, Hanko leads with a passkey and falls back to an email code.
Hanko is a German company in Kiel, and its core is open source under AGPL-3.0, so the same code can run on your servers. Its cloud has a free tier and a paid plan from €99 a month. Against Clerk, the practical change is the contract: a German entity and the option to take the whole system in-house later.
What Hanko does better than Clerk
- German contracting entity instead of a Delaware company
- Self-hosting route under an open-source licence
- Passkey-first flow with a standalone Passkey API
- Free cloud tier for development and small projects
Where Hanko is a step down from Clerk
- Official SDK covers JavaScript and TypeScript, with other languages from the community
- Cloud plans start at €99 a month once the free tier is outgrown
- The AGPL licence needs review before embedding in closed products
Standout against Clerk. Hanko is the only tool on this page that combines an open-source core, a free cloud tier and a passkey-first login flow.
Best for: Companies that want customer and employee identity from one German vendor
cidaas, sold by Widas ID GmbH in Wimsheim, covers both customer-facing login and employee access, which Clerk does not try to do. The pricing page lists Customer IAM from €699 a month for 1,000 users and Workforce IAM at €4.50 per user per month, with 20% off for yearly payment. The vendor states it is developed and hosted in Germany.
Compared with Clerk, the shape of the purchase changes. Clerk starts free and grows by retained user; cidaas starts at a fixed monthly amount, with ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 behind it and a 30-day trial covering up to 500 customer users. It suits a company with a procurement process more than a founder with an empty database.
What cidaas does better than Clerk
- Hosting stated as Germany instead of anywhere in the world
- ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 listed against Clerk's SOC 2 report on a higher tier
- Workforce IAM available from the same vendor
- List prices published for four tiers
Where cidaas is a step down from Clerk
- €699 a month is a steep entry point for a small application
- No free plan comparable to Clerk's Hobby tier
- No self-hosted edition
Standout against Clerk. cidaas prints a euro price for customer identities and a separate per-user price for employees on one pricing page.
Best for: Product teams that want sign-in and per-resource permissions from the same API
Authress, from Rhosys AG in Winterthur, splits identity from access control. Login covers hosted UI, social providers, passwordless and WebAuthn, and the access side models permissions on single resources that can be nested. Clerk's organisation roles cover team accounts; Authress is built for cases where one customer may open one document and not the next.
The vendor lists SSO connections and machine tokens as unlimited, which speaks directly to Clerk's $75 charge per extra connection. Its own price page is rendered in the browser and could not be read here, so the saving cannot be calculated. It is hosted by a Swiss company, with an option to restrict storage to a region.
What Authress does better than Clerk
- Permissions modelled per resource rather than only per role
- SSO connections listed as unlimited
- Terraform provider for access rules as code
- Swiss vendor with a region restriction option
Where Authress is a step down from Clerk
- Prices could not be read, so cost against Clerk is unknown
- Smaller vendor with a smaller community
- No self-hosted edition
Standout against Clerk. Authress lists unlimited SSO connections and machine tokens next to resource-level permissions, all behind one API.
Best for: Engineering teams with API security needs and the staff to operate their own server
Curity AB in Stockholm sells an identity server built around OAuth, OpenID Connect, FAPI, SAML and SCIM, certified by the OpenID Foundation. It has no hosted service at all, so it replaces Clerk only for teams ready to run infrastructure. The free Community Edition lets you start, and the paid editions are a flat annual subscription priced on request.
Against Clerk the trade is stark. You lose prebuilt components and a dashboard someone else keeps online, and you gain a deployment that sits on-premise or in the cloud account you choose, with no vendor region in between. The flat subscription also removes the per-user and per-connection arithmetic of Clerk's plans.
What Curity does better than Clerk
- Data stays on infrastructure you control
- Flat annual subscription instead of per-user billing
- Standards coverage that includes FAPI, SAML and SCIM
- Swedish contracting entity
Where Curity is a step down from Clerk
- Every deployment is your own operation
- No embeddable sign-up components in the style of Clerk
- Paid prices not published
Standout against Clerk. Curity pairs an OpenID Foundation certified server with a flat annual subscription instead of per-user billing.
Keycloak
Free open-source identity server with the widest feature set and the highest operating cost
Best for: Organisations with platform engineers that need federation, brokering and no licence fee
Keycloak is Apache-2.0 software under the CNCF. It brings OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0, identity brokering to external providers, and LDAP and Active Directory federation, which Clerk does not offer in that form. There is no vendor to contract with, so there is no jurisdiction question beyond where you run it.
The cost moves from the invoice to your team. You run, patch, back up and scale the server, plan major upgrades, and build or theme the login pages yourself. A Kubernetes operator and a commercially supported Red Hat build exist for companies that want a support contract. Against Clerk, a small startup will find the setup heavier, and a large organisation will find it cheaper.
What Keycloak does better than Clerk
- No licence fee at any user count
- Federation with LDAP and Active Directory
- Identity brokering to many external providers
- Source code that auditors can read
Where Keycloak is a step down from Clerk
- No hosted first-party service
- Large configuration surface and upgrade planning
- Login pages are themed server pages rather than embedded components
Standout against Clerk. Keycloak carries no licence fee at any user count and has no contracting vendor behind it.
Nevis Security
Zurich identity platform for regulated sectors, sold through sales rather than sign-up
Best for: Banks, insurers and similar operators that manage customers and partners together
Nevis Security AG in Zurich offers the Nevis ID platform for customer and partner identities and a separate Authentication Cloud for passwordless login. Its data model covers brokers, agencies and family accounts, and tenants have separate administration. That is a different scope from Clerk's, which targets product teams and not insurers with partner networks.
The vendor claims its technology secures over 80 per cent of online banking transactions in Switzerland. That figure is the vendor's own. No price, free tier or data location appeared on the pages read, so a trial of Nevis starts with a sales conversation, unlike Clerk's self-serve plans.
What Nevis Security does better than Clerk
- Customer and partner identities in one data model
- Multi-tenant administration per user group
- Fraud detection listed beside login
Where Nevis Security is a step down from Clerk
- No self-serve sign-up or published pricing
- Heavy for a small application
- Data location not stated on the pages read
Standout against Clerk. Nevis Security writes its materials for the procurement teams of banks, insurers, healthcare operators and government.
Best for: Companies that stay on their IdP and want passkeys rolled out and measured
Corbado does not replace Clerk. Its homepage says the identity provider stays, and the product adds a managed passkey server (Connect) and a login analytics layer (Observe) beside it. That makes it a way to reduce reliance on the passkey module of a US provider without migrating users.
Corbado GmbH is registered in Munich and states ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certifications. Both products are priced on request, depending on usage, deployment and support. A team deciding to leave Clerk still needs a user store and sessions from another tool, and Corbado can sit on top of that choice.
What Corbado does better than Clerk
- Passkey rollout controls with fallbacks
- Analytics on why logins fail
- German entity with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II stated
Where Corbado is a step down from Clerk
- Does not hold users or sessions
- No published prices
- No self-hosted edition
Standout against Clerk. Corbado adds passkey rollout controls and login analytics on top of an identity provider it does not replace.
Best for: Fintechs and banks that need second factors and transaction confirmation
Futurae, from Futurae Technologies AG in Zurich, supplies the factors after the password: push, QR code, app code, SMS code and FIDO2, plus adaptive authentication and transaction confirmation. Its APIs plug into the login system you have, so it complements Clerk or replaces only Clerk's MFA feature.
The price is visible: the Integrated plan is listed at CHF 0.25 per monthly active user for 1,000 to 10,000 users, charged once per calendar month. Trust Signals, which reads device, location and session context, can run on its own. No user directory or sign-up form is described on the pages read.
What Futurae does better than Clerk
- Transaction confirmation for payment flows
- Fraud context from Trust Signals
- Per-user price stated on the pricing page
- Several authenticator types including FIDO2
Where Futurae is a step down from Clerk
- No sign-up form or user directory described
- Larger plans are custom
Standout against Clerk. Futurae sells Trust Signals, a fraud-context module that can run without its authentication product.
Best for: Regulated enterprises that need national eIDs, verification and signing together
Signicat, in Trondheim and operating since 2007, connects services to more than 30 electronic identity schemes, including Norwegian and Swedish BankID, Danish MitID and Dutch iDIN, and also offers passkeys, PSD2 strong customer authentication and qualified signatures. It answers a question Clerk does not ask: not just whether this is the same user, but who the person is.
Pricing is custom, based on platform fees and per-transaction charges, so a comparison with Clerk's public tiers is not possible. Norway belongs to the EEA but not the EU, which matters for some procurement rules. For a plain product login Signicat is more than needed; for onboarding a bank customer it covers ground Clerk leaves open.
What Signicat does better than Clerk
- National eID coverage across many countries
- Verification, authentication and signing from one vendor
- Qualified signature support under eIDAS
Where Signicat is a step down from Clerk
- Custom pricing and an enterprise sales process
- Far more than a small product needs
- No published prices to prototype against
Standout against Clerk. Signicat describes itself on its tool page as a qualified trust service provider, audited for qualified signatures.
Best for: Services that must accept MitID, BankID or iDIN from Danish, Swedish or Dutch users
Idura ApS in Copenhagen, formerly Criipto, lets a service accept national electronic IDs through one integration: MitID, Norwegian and Swedish BankID, the Finnish Trust Network, Dutch iDIN, the German Personalausweis and others. For a Danish webshop selling age-restricted goods, that is more useful than any social login Clerk offers.
The scope is narrow by design. Idura authenticates people who hold a supported eID and supplies no user table or profile management on the pages read, so it pairs with a tool such as Keycloak or Hanko. A free test account is offered, and the amounts on its pricing pages were not readable here.
What Idura does better than Clerk
- Government-backed eID login instead of email and social accounts
- Age verification and eID signing in the same product
- Free test account to try the integration
Where Idura is a step down from Clerk
- Only works for people with a supported eID
- No user directory or sessions
Standout against Clerk. Idura is built around national eIDs rather than around accounts that you create.
What actually breaks when you switch
The first break is the user table. Export the users from Clerk with their identifiers, emails, phone numbers and metadata before you cut over, and keep the old Clerk user ID as a field in your own database, because your tables probably reference it.
Webhooks that create or update users in your database must be rewired to the new provider's events, and any code that reads a Clerk session token needs to verify a new one with a different issuer and key set.
The second break is people. Users with passwords will meet a new login screen, and the safest path is a period in which both providers run, followed by a forced move to a passkey or email code.
Enterprise customers with SAML connections have to reconfigure them on their side, which means a ticket for each. Check your Clerk subscription term before you cancel: the $20 and $250 prices on the pricing page are the annual ones, so a cut-over in the middle of a year may leave months already paid for.
Does Clerk offer EU data residency?
The pages read for this comparison do not describe a region choice. The privacy policy says information may be transferred, processed and stored anywhere in the world, including the United States, and the pricing page lists a GDPR and DPA commitment on every plan, which is a statement about contract terms rather than storage location. If you need a written answer on where the user table lives, ask Clerk's sales team before you sign.
The European tools answer the question differently. cidaas says it is developed and hosted in Germany, Corbado runs a shared cloud by default and offers dedicated instances and regions on request, and Keycloak and Curity leave the hosting to you. Several others, such as Futurae and Nevis Security, do not state a data location on the pages read, so the same written question applies there.
Can I keep my sign-in screens when I leave Clerk?
Not as they are. Clerk's prebuilt components are part of its SDKs, so a replacement means new components. Hanko ships its own web components that you embed and style, and Authress lists customizable React components, so a React product can come close to what it has now without writing every screen by hand.
Keycloak takes another route: it serves the login pages itself, your application redirects to them, and themes match your brand. That is closer to a classic single sign-on setup than to an embedded component, and the user notices the redirect.
Which one to pick
For a small product team that just wants to leave a US vendor, Hanko is the nearest swap: components, passkeys, JWT sessions and a free tier, with the option to self-host. If the product needs permissions on single resources, Authress covers that, and if the buyer wants a German vendor with printed prices, cidaas does. Teams with their own platform engineers should look at Keycloak first, or Curity if API security and standards are the main concern.
The remaining tools solve narrower problems. Pick Corbado to add passkeys without moving users, Futurae for second factors with fraud context, Nevis Security for a bank or insurer with partner networks, and Signicat or Idura when the user must prove a legal identity through BankID or MitID. Stay with Clerk if you have no concern about jurisdiction, value its components, and the retained-user pricing works out for your traffic.
Frequently Asked Questions
Hanko is the closest match when you want embeddable components, passkeys by default and a free tier, and it can also be self-hosted. Authress fits a product that needs per-resource permissions next to login, cidaas suits a company that wants a German vendor with list prices, and Keycloak suits a team that will run its own identity server. There is no single best choice without a criterion.
Clerk's pricing page states that its service is built to be compliant with GDPR principles and lists DPAs on every plan. The legal question for a European customer is a different one: the contracting party is Clerk, Inc., the governing law is Delaware, and storage may be anywhere in the world. Whether that is acceptable depends on your own transfer assessment.
Clerk's Pro plan is $20 a month billed annually with 50,000 retained users included per app, and Business is $250 a month. cidaas lists Customer IAM from €699 a month for 1,000 users, Futurae lists CHF 0.25 per monthly active user, Hanko lists a paid plan from €99 a month, and Keycloak has no licence fee. Several others price on request.
Yes. Keycloak is Apache-2.0 software, Curity is an identity server that only runs on infrastructure you choose, and Hanko publishes its core as open source next to its paid cloud. Clerk itself is offered as a hosted service on the pages read. Self-hosting trades the vendor bill for your own operations, backups and upgrades.
Not always. Corbado is designed to sit next to the identity provider you already use and adds passkeys and login analytics, and Futurae adds strong authentication and fraud signals to an existing login. If your only concern is one missing feature, adding one of these may be a smaller step than a full migration.
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