Outseta vs Clerk: logins and billing for custom-coded sites

Login components in code, or a CRM as well

Pick Clerk when a developer is adding login components to a coded app and its free Hobby plan is enough. Pick Outseta when a custom-coded site also needs a CRM, email and a help desk in the same account as logins and Stripe subscriptions.

Billed monthly, as read on October 23, 2026, Clerk Pro is $25 a month and Outseta Start is $47 a month. A monthly retained user is a user who visits your app in a given month at least one day after signing up, and it is Clerk's unit. Outseta's unit is contacts, which its pricing page does not define. The two counts are not the same.

Clerk's pricing page names no CRM, email, help desk, Webflow or Framer. Clerk includes 50,000 monthly retained users per app on Hobby and Pro, then $0.02 a month each.

How each adds logins to a custom-coded site

Outseta's pricing page names authentication, Stripe payments, CRM, email and a help desk on every plan.

Outseta says it can be integrated into any web-based project, with or without code. The sign-up, login and profile embeds open as pop-ups or sit on a page, and a REST API is there for code. You can also keep your own login system, or have your backend verify Outseta's signed token.

Clerk describes itself as full-stack authentication and user management, with prebuilt UI components. All of its Pro features can be tried in the development instance of your application, and its Hobby plan says no credit card is required. For tools beyond these two, see Outseta alternatives.

Billing and the fee on each payment

Clerk's pricing page shows Stripe 2.9% + $0.30 plus Clerk Billing 0.7%. Clerk's docs say Clerk Billing only uses Stripe for payment processing and is separate from Stripe Billing, so plans and subscriptions made in Clerk are not synced to Stripe. Clerk Pro is $20 a month billed annually or $25 billed monthly, and Business is $250 billed annually or $300 billed monthly.

Outseta Start is $37 a month billed yearly or $47 billed monthly, with a 2% payment fee. Scale is $97 billed yearly or $127 billed monthly, with 1%. Outseta's pricing page puts Stripe's card fee at typically 2.9% + 30¢ in the US. Clerk's 0.7% is Clerk's own fee. A separate 0.7% appears in Outseta's October 1, 2026 release post as a Stripe Billing charge on new accounts' subscription payments. Outseta pricing adds Pro and Max.

What Outseta says about Clerk

Outseta's comparison page says Clerk charges $100 a month for user impersonation, while Clerk's pricing page includes 5 impersonations a month in every plan and sells unlimited impersonation as an add-on, so treat Outseta's line as its position.

The same page says Outseta has been around since 2016, an Outseta claim about itself. The table above uses each vendor's own pricing page, not either vendor's comparison page.