Staxly

Clerk vs GitHub Actions

User management and authentication as a service
vs. CI/CD native to GitHub — workflows + marketplace + hosted runners

Clerk website ↗GitHub Actions ↗

Pricing tiers

Clerk

Free
50k MAU included. No SSO/SAML. Perfect for side projects and early prototypes.
Free
Pro
$25/mo (or $20/mo annual). 50k MAU, $0.02 each after. 1 enterprise SSO connection per app. Webhooks, JWT templates, custom session duration.
$25/mo
Business
$300/mo (or $250/mo annual). Advanced organizations, enhanced support, additional enterprise features.
$300/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume MAU discounts, SLA, workspace-wide SAML SSO, dedicated support.
Custom
Clerk website ↗

GitHub Actions

Public Repos
$0. Free unlimited minutes on hosted runners (Linux). No private runners.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free (Personal)
$0. 2,000 minutes/mo private repos (Linux). 500MB Packages storage.
Free
Per-minute Overage
$0.008/min Linux ($0.08 macOS, $0.016 Windows) after included minutes.
$0/mo
Team
$4/user/mo. 3,000 minutes/mo. 2GB storage. Org management.
$4/mo
Enterprise
$21/user/mo. 50,000 minutes/mo. 50GB storage. SAML SSO, audit.
$21/mo
GitHub Actions ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing hobby on Clerk vs free on GitHub Actions.

MetricClerkGitHub Actions
mao100 orgs/month—
mau50000 users/month—
sso connections0 connections—

Features

Clerk · 15 features

  • Account Portal — Hosted sign-in/user profile pages at accounts.yourapp.com — zero UI code, fully …
  • Bot Protection — Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA integrated into sign-up.
  • Clerk Billing — Built-in Stripe-powered billing: subscriptions, plans, proration — ties directly…
  • Enterprise SSO (SAML/OIDC) — SAML and OIDC for enterprise customers. Per-domain connection. Pro+ (1 included)…
  • Impersonation — Act as a user from dashboard to debug. Logged.
  • JWT Templates — Custom JWT issuance for third-party backends (Supabase, Hasura, Firebase, Convex…
  • Machine Tokens (M2M) — API keys and machine tokens for service-to-service auth in addition to user sess…
  • Multi-Factor Auth — TOTP (authenticator apps), SMS OTP, backup codes. Forced or optional per user.
  • Organizations (B2B) — Multi-tenant orgs with roles, permissions, invitations, domain allowlist, and pe…
  • Passkeys (WebAuthn) — Passwordless passkey sign-in with per-device biometrics.
  • Prebuilt Components — Drop-in React components: <SignIn/>, <SignUp/>, <UserButton/>, <OrganizationSwit…
  • Sessions — Server-side session tokens. Sliding expiration by default; configurable absolute…
  • User Management — Full user CRUD, metadata (public/private/unsafe), email/phone verification, ban/…
  • Waitlist Mode — Collect sign-ups before opening the app. Approve waitlist entries to activate ac…
  • Webhooks — Events: user.created/updated/deleted, session.created, organization.* — delivere…

GitHub Actions · 18 features

  • Actions Cache — Persistent cache across runs.
  • Actions Marketplace — 20K+ reusable actions.
  • ARC (K8s Controller) — Autoscale self-hosted on K8s.
  • Artifacts — Upload/download job outputs.
  • Composite Actions — Actions made of other actions.
  • Concurrency Groups — Cancel / queue overlapping runs.
  • Container Jobs — Run a whole job in a Docker image.
  • Environments + Approvals — Gate deploys with manual approval.
  • Job Summaries — Markdown summaries in UI.
  • Larger Runners — 4-64 vCPU, ARM, GPU.
  • Matrix Strategy — Fan out over axes.
  • OIDC Cloud Auth — Exchange JWT for cloud credentials.
  • Reusable Workflows — workflow_call.
  • Secrets + Variables — Encrypted org/repo/env secrets.
  • Self-Hosted Runners — Your own runners.
  • Service Containers — Sidecar containers (DBs, Redis) per job.
  • Triggers — push, pull_request, schedule, workflow_dispatch, etc.
  • Workflows — Event-driven YAML workflows.

Developer interfaces

KindClerkGitHub Actions
CLI—gh run CLI
SDK@clerk/astro, @clerk/backend / @clerk/clerk-sdk-node, @clerk/chrome-extension, @clerk/clerk-expo, @clerk/clerk-js (vanilla), @clerk/clerk-react, @clerk/clerk-react-native, @clerk/nextjs, @clerk/nuxt, @clerk/remix, clerk-sdk-go, clerk-sdk-python, clerk-sdk-ruby, @clerk/tanstack-start, @clerk/vue@actions/* toolkit
RESTBackend REST API, Frontend APIGitHub Actions REST API
GRAPHQL—GitHub GraphQL (Actions)
MCPClerk MCP—
OTHERWebhooks (Svix)Actions Marketplace, Actions Tab (Web), workflow_* webhooks, Workflow YAML
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Clerk and GitHub Actions are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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