Clerk vs WorkOS vs Stytch for B2B SaaS (2026)

Your first enterprise prospect sends a security questionnaire, and three lines decide the deal: SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning and audit logs. The auth provider you picked for its sign-in screen now sets what that customer costs you monthly. We've compared Clerk with Auth0 and NextAuth and with Better Auth; this post covers the B2B specialists those leave out: WorkOS, Stytch and Descope.

Should a B2B SaaS use Clerk, WorkOS or Stytch?

Use Clerk for most B2B MVPs, because organisations, invitations, roles and self-serve SSO arrive as ready-made Next.js components; choose WorkOS when enterprise SSO and SCIM drive your sales from day one, and Stytch when your enterprise customers fit inside its five free SSO or SCIM connections. If a buyer needs auth data held in the UK or EU by a hosted provider, Descope is the only one of the four that offers it.

All four now cover the B2B checklist. They differ on what each enterprise connection costs, how much interface you get, and where your users' records live.

What does a B2B SaaS need from auth beyond a login screen?

A consumer app has users; a B2B app has organisations. Each customer business gets its own account, its people join as members, and every query is scoped to it. That's how a SaaS gives users their own business account: the auth provider models the organisation, and its ID becomes the tenant ID on your tables, as our multi-tenant SaaS architecture guide sets out. Around that sits the enterprise checklist:

• Invitations and roles, including custom roles for bigger customers.
• Enterprise SSO: each customer signs in through their own Okta, Entra ID or Google Workspace over SAML or OIDC, one connection per customer.
• SCIM directory sync, so leavers removed from the customer's directory lose access automatically.
• Domain verification and auto-join for anyone with a verified company email.
• MFA, often enforced per organisation.
• Audit logs the customer can export or stream to their SIEM.
• An admin portal where the customer's IT team configures SSO and SCIM themselves.

Clerk vs WorkOS vs Stytch vs Descope: how do they compare?

Prices are as of October 2026, from each vendor's pricing page; vendors change pricing often.

SSO pricing is where the bills diverge, which the next section works through. Data residency is where UK founders get caught out: three of the four keep auth data in the US, under transfer mechanisms such as the Data Privacy Framework that most buyers accept and some regulated ones won't. The detail is on WorkOS's pricing page and in the comparison table on Descope's pricing page.

What does enterprise SSO cost per customer?

Users are nearly free at B2B scale; enterprise connections are not. Take a SaaS with 2,000 monthly active users across 60 customer organisations. Every free tier covers the users; the bill moves with how many customers need SSO, then SCIM on top:

• Clerk: Pro at $25 plus the $100 Enhanced B2B add-on, which links SSO connections to organisations. One SSO and one directory connection are included, then $75 a month each; directory sync isn't billed until 1 January 2027.
• WorkOS: $125 per SSO connection and $125 per directory connection; the users cost nothing.
• Stytch: five connections free across SSO and SCIM combined, then $125 each.
• Descope: Pro at $249 plus $1 per active tenant beyond 35. SCIM needs Growth at $799, with 100 tenants and 10 SSO connections included, then $50 per connection, and no separate SCIM fee listed. Both are billed annually.

The cliff is per customer, not per user. On WorkOS, each enterprise account on SSO and SCIM costs $250 a month before discounts, whether it has five seats or five thousand. Stytch is cheapest for your first five, Descope by your fifteenth. Whichever you choose, put SSO in an enterprise plan priced well above what the connection costs you.

Is Clerk good for B2B SaaS? An honest review

Clerk is the best-value B2B auth for a product with tens to low hundreds of customer organisations and a handful of enterprise accounts. Its best B2B features save weeks of building:

• Organisation components: a switcher and a profile with members, invitations and roles, wired to the session your middleware checks.
• Self-serve SSO and directory sync, added in 2026: a Security tab in the organisation profile where the customer's IT admin sets up SAML or OIDC and SCIM for Okta, Entra ID or Google Workspace. That closes most of the gap with WorkOS's Admin Portal.
• Verified domains, with members joining automatically or on approval.
• A CLI: Clerk's reached 1.0 in April 2026; clerk init scaffolds it into a project, much as npx workos@latest does for WorkOS.

Where it gets expensive: MFA and passkeys need Pro, and custom roles, verified domains and organisation-linked SSO need the add-on, so real B2B use starts at $125 a month. Past 100 active organisations you pay $1 each, plus $75 per connection. Admin audit logs are Business-plan only ($300 a month), there's nothing for logging your own app's events, and data is US-hosted with no region choice. We model growth-stage costs in Clerk vs Better Auth.

When is WorkOS the better choice?

When enterprise customers are the business from day one, not an eventual upsell. WorkOS began as an SSO and directory sync API, and it shows. Its hosted Admin Portal walks a customer's IT team through domain verification, SSO, directory sync and log streams, with guides for each identity provider. Its Audit Logs product records your app's own events per organisation, keeps them 30 days by default and streams them to a SIEM at $125 a month per stream. AuthKit adds passwords, passkeys, MFA and magic auth, free to a million monthly active users.

The trade-offs: it's the priciest per connection, sign-in runs through hosted pages your app redirects to, and WorkOS describes its cloud service as US-based.

What about Stytch and Descope?

Stytch builds B2B auth organisation-first: a Member belongs to one organisation, so someone in two customer accounts is two Members. That's clean isolation, and more work if you want one profile across organisations. Its passwordless roots show in magic links and one-time codes. The free tier includes JIT provisioning by email domain and per-organisation MFA policies; above 10,000 MAU, pricing goes through sales. Twilio completed its acquisition of Stytch in November 2025. Stytch runs only on US servers, and its docs call strict regional isolation a hard blocker.

Descope is built around Flows, a no-code editor for sign-in, MFA and invitation screens that an SDK component renders in your app. Passkeys, magic links and one-time codes are on every plan. Its standout for UK founders is residency: on Growth and Enterprise you choose a region per project, including Frankfurt and London. The catch is the entry price, with SCIM and the Admin Portal starting at $799 a month.

Need passwordless sign-in and organisations together? All four do both; Stytch and Descope lead with it. Keycloak is the open-source option: a self-hosted, Apache-licensed identity server with Organizations fully supported since Keycloak 26. It's credible on-premise, but it's a Java service you run, patch and theme yourself, as our Better Auth comparison covers.

How do you migrate off Auth0, or add SSO beside existing auth?

Budget one to two weeks of engineering to move off Auth0; adding SSO beside your current auth can take days. Auth0's standard export omits password hashes; you request them by support ticket, which WorkOS's migration guide warns can take a week or more. Clerk and WorkOS both import bcrypt hashes, so users keep their passwords.

WorkOS's CLI exports Auth0 users, organisations, memberships, roles and SSO connections as one package. Clerk provides an open-source migration script and supports trickle migration, running both systems while active users move across; keep old IDs in external_id so foreign keys survive. Active sessions end at cutover either way.

You may not need to migrate. WorkOS's standalone SSO API sits beside whatever you run now: the user signs in at their identity provider, WorkOS hands your callback a profile, and your app creates its own session. It's the lowest-lock-in way to close one SAML deal.

Our default: Clerk, with WorkOS when enterprise sales lead

For the B2B products we build through our software development work, the default is Clerk on Next.js, with Postgres (often on Supabase), Stripe and Resend on Vercel. Clerk's organisation ID becomes the tenant ID on every tenant-owned table, enforced with Row-Level Security in the database we pair with Clerk. On an eight-week fixed-price build, its ready-made screens are weeks we don't spend. We deviate when:

• Enterprise sales lead from day one: large accounts that each need SSO and SCIM, or many users and few enterprise customers. We pick WorkOS.
• The product is passwordless-first with a few enterprise customers: Stytch, while they fit in its free connections.
• Auth data must stay in the UK or EU: Better Auth on your own database remains our first answer; Descope is the hosted alternative when the client doesn't want to run auth.

What we don't do is put a pre-revenue startup on per-connection enterprise pricing for a pipeline that doesn't exist yet.

Frequently asked questions

Is WorkOS free?

AuthKit, WorkOS's user management, is free up to 1 million monthly active users; enterprise features are billed per connection. SSO and Directory Sync each cost $125 a month per connection for the first 15, falling with volume. Audit log streaming is $125 a month per SIEM connection. In practice, WorkOS is free until your first enterprise customer.

Which B2B auth providers keep data in the UK or EU?

Of these four, only Descope lets you choose a region, including Frankfurt and London, on its Growth and Enterprise plans. Clerk and Stytch host in the US and rely on the Data Privacy Framework for EU and UK transfers; WorkOS describes its service as US-based. Self-hosting is the other route, and our UK GDPR guide for SaaS startups covers what the law requires. This is general guidance, not legal advice.

Do you need SCIM for an MVP?

No: SCIM arrives with your first large customer, usually in the same questionnaire as SSO. It deprovisions leavers automatically, which security teams audit. Clerk includes one directory connection on Pro and Stytch's free tier covers five connections, so your first SCIM customer usually costs nothing extra on either.

Can one user belong to several customer organisations?

Yes, but providers model it differently, and it shapes your users table. Clerk and WorkOS attach one user to many organisations through memberships, and Clerk tracks which one is active in each session. Stytch creates a separate Member in each organisation and uses Discovery login to let someone pick.

Want B2B auth priced around your real pipeline?

The right provider depends on how many customers will need SSO and what they pay. If you want auth chosen and costed against your actual pipeline, book a free scoping call. We'll scope it and quote the build fixed-price, so you know the cost before committing.