Clerk vs Axowl

The base plans are the same

Free is $0 on both, with 50,000 users included. Pro is $25 per month on Clerk ($20 billed annually) and $25 per month on Axowl ($20 billed annually). Business is $300 per month on Clerk ($250 annually) and $299 per month on Axowl ($239 annually). Enterprise is custom on both.

Axowl adds a tier Clerk does not have: Pro+ at $79 per month ($63 billed annually). Price is not the argument. What follows is where the two products are shaped differently.

One identity boundary, however many apps

Most auth products treat an application as the unit. Your web app is one instance, your mobile app another, your admin console another. The same person becomes a different user in each one. They register a passkey four times, appear in four analytics dashboards, and you write glue code to reconcile them.

In Axowl the unit is the App Group. Access is granted on AppGroupId times EndUserId, not per application, so adding a fifth app means your existing users are already in it. The group carries a single WebAuthn Relying Party ID, so a passkey registered in your web app authenticates in your admin console — the same credential, not a synced copy. Login methods, MFA policy, social providers, bot protection, and branding are set once on the group. End-user events carry the group ID, so activity across four products reads as one story. Applications are unlimited from the free tier.

The alternative is not a bit more setup. It is a cross-app SSO layer you build and own yourself — the exact infrastructure you bought an auth product to avoid writing.

Your customer's org chart does not fit in a flat list

Clerk organizations are flat. Axowl has organizations plus sub-organizations that each own their budget, teams that nest without limit and are not billed by depth, and role hierarchies up to ten levels where permissions inherit down the tree.

Clerk sells organization-scoped B2B as a $100 per month add-on. On Axowl organizations are unlimited from Pro+ at $79 per month.

Where the bill diverges: SSO connections

An enterprise SSO connection is one customer of yours, so this is the line item that grows as you sell upmarket. Clerk includes one connection on Pro and charges $75 per month for each additional one. Axowl includes one on Pro, three on Pro+, and ten on Business, and charges $49 per month for each additional one.

Five enterprise customers on SAML costs $325 per month on Clerk and $177 per month on Axowl. Ten costs $700 per month on Clerk; on Axowl all ten are included in Business at $299 per month. Both vendors drop the per-connection rate at volume; these figures use each vendor's first band.

Strong security is the product, not a setting

Clerk secures the login. Axowl secures the login and the record of it. Strong security here does not mean a longer list of toggles — it means the guarantees hold even when something goes wrong: when an attacker has your database, when an insider has production access, or when a regulator asks you to prove a record from eighteen months ago.

Every authentication product can tell you a user signed in. The question an auditor or regulator asks is different: can you prove that record was not changed afterward? With ordinary audit logs the answer is no. A log is a claim, and anyone with database access can rewrite a row without the log showing it.

Axowl keys derive inside silicon and never leave the chip, so there is no key file to copy, no secret in an environment variable, and no credential sitting in a backup — a breach yields ciphertext and nothing more. Every event is hash-chained: each record commits to the one before it, so changing a single timestamp, actor, or permission grant breaks every link after it.

This is not a feature Clerk missed by oversight. It is a different product category. If you need sign-in, Clerk does that well. If you need to prove what happened, a log anyone can edit will not hold.

Where Clerk is ahead

Clerk has been shipping longer, and more people are using it today.