Staxly

Temporal vs Clerk

Durable execution platform for mission-critical workflows
vs. User management and authentication as a service

Temporal website ↗Clerk website ↗

Pricing tiers

Temporal

Self-Hosted (OSS)
Free forever. MIT license. Run the Temporal cluster yourself on K8s/Docker.
$0 base (usage-based)
Cloud (usage-based)
Temporal Cloud. Pay per action ($25 per 1M actions base). Active user + storage also billed.
$0 base (usage-based)
Business Plan
Starts ~$100/mo commit. Multi-region, SSO, priority support.
Custom
Enterprise
Custom. HIPAA, PCI, dedicated clusters, enterprise SLA.
Custom
Temporal website ↗

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 ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing oss on Temporal vs hobby on Clerk.

MetricTemporalClerk
mao—100 orgs/month
mau—50000 users/month
sso connections—0 connections

Features

Temporal · 16 features

  • Activities — Retryable units of work.
  • Activity Retries — Declarative retry policies.
  • Child Workflows — Nested workflow composition.
  • Continue-As-New — Close + restart workflow to prune history.
  • Nexus (cross-namespace) — Call workflows across namespaces/teams.
  • Queries — Synchronous read of workflow state.
  • Saga / Compensations — Rollback pattern via compensating activities.
  • Schedules — Cron-like recurring workflows.
  • Self-Host — Deploy cluster on your infra.
  • Signals — Async messages into a running workflow.
  • Timers — Durable sleeps — hours, days, months.
  • Update — Synchronous RPC into workflow with validation.
  • Visibility + Search Attrs — Query workflow state via Elasticsearch/native store.
  • Web UI — Inspect workflow history, events, stack.
  • Workflows — Durable, replayable, long-running functions.
  • Workflow Versioning — Patch workflow code without breaking in-flight runs.

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…

Developer interfaces

KindTemporalClerk
CLItemporal CLI—
SDKTemporal Go SDK, temporalio (Python), @temporalio (TypeScript), Temporal Java SDK, Temporal .NET SDK, Temporal PHP 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
REST—Backend REST API, Frontend API
MCP—Clerk MCP
OTHERTemporal gRPC API, Temporal Web UIWebhooks (Svix)
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Temporal and Clerk are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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