A Clerk auth alternative that keeps user data in France

Pick Clerk if your app is React, Next.js or Expo and you want sign-in screens that exist on day one: its prebuilt components are well ahead of anything we have, because we have none. Pick it if you want 50,000 retained users free, enterprise single sign-on, a SOC 2 Type 2 report (Clerk states it has held one since May 2022, available on the Business plan and above), and a public DPA you can read without asking. If your users' data does not need to sit in the EU, it is a very good product.

Pick Nautilus if the stored data has to be on servers in France (the emails we send go through Resend, a US provider): Clerk states that it does not offer regional data residency or region selection and that EU personal data is transferred to US infrastructure under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Pick us if you want your own screens and a plain HTTP API behind them; if you want fully custom roles without a $100-a-month add-on; if you want unused accounts deleted for you after a warning; or if your customers sign in with Telegram.

If you are a small team with a Next.js app and no residency requirement, Clerk is probably the faster way to ship and the cheaper one. We say so because it is true.

Checked 2026-10-15. "Ahead" says who is ahead on that row.

Source: https://clerk.com/pricing, checked 2026-10-15 (and https://clerk.com/pricing.md the same day). Clerk bills monthly retained users: a user who visits your app at least one day after signing up, so someone who signs up and never returns is never billed. That is a narrower unit than our active user, so for the same people Clerk may count fewer. Every plan includes 50,000 retained users per app. Above that, $0.02 each from 50,001 to 100,000, $0.018 from 100,001 to 1,000,000. Annual billing is cheaper: $20 a month for Pro, $250 for Business, $85 for the add-on.

How to read it

• Hobby is free but has no two-factor and up to 3 social connections. Pro adds two-factor and unlimited social connections. Custom roles are the $100 add-on.
• Business adds, among other things, the SOC 2 report, the admin audit trail and 10 dashboard seats ($20 for each extra seat).
• Enterprise is custom and billed annually. Single sign-on connections beyond the first are $75 each.
• At 10,000 and 50,000 users, with custom roles, Clerk is $125 against our $110.83. That is $14 a month apart. It is not a reason to move on its own.

• Clerk (checked 2026-10-15, https://clerk.com/security): the security page says Clerk does not offer regional data residency or region selection, that its infrastructure and subprocessors are in the USA, and that EU, UK and Swiss personal data is transferred under the Data Privacy Framework, which Clerk is self-certified under. The DPA and a DPF notice are public. Clerk says its audited platform controls are the same on every plan.
• Nautilus: the API, the databases and the engines run on our own servers in France, at OVHcloud, one region, no choice. That is where it runs, not a compliance badge. A DPA based on the Standard Contractual Clauses comes with Pro.
• Verne Software is registered in Serbia; the servers are in France.
• Where the servers are does not settle your obligations; your lawyer's view of the provider's own jurisdiction is a separate question we do not answer for you.

• What is open: Ory Kratos (sign-in) and Svix (webhooks) are open source; you can run them yourself. The webhook layer is the same engine Clerk uses.
• What is ours: projects, keys, organizations and roles, deletion rules, the audit log, the dashboard, and the scheduler, which is our own code.
• Users: readable through the API. For all of them with their password hashes, ask support from your account address and you get one file within 7 days, encrypted to your own key, with social links, metadata, organizations and roles as well. It is in the format our own import accepts and that maps onto Ory Kratos (how it works). A person on our side runs it; there is no button and no API call for it.
• Clerk's pull is mostly in the components: if you build on its prebuilt UI, you rebuild the screens on leaving. Ours is the opposite. You build the screens, and they are yours.

Scenario: 10,000 active users; custom roles, organizations and two-factor. The line that decides is sign-in against sign-in. Prices as of 2026-10-15.

Not in the sum: webhooks you send to your own customers and scheduled jobs. Clerk's own webhooks (it uses Svix) cover Clerk's events only. Nautilus Pro includes both (1,000,000 webhook messages and 1,000 recurring jobs a month). Elsewhere they are services of their own: for example Svix Professional (DPA and SOC 2, 50,000 messages included) from $490 a month, and a scheduler such as cron-job.org, which is free, donation-funded, and does not state where it is hosted or whether it has a DPA. We leave them out of the sum because the comparison that decides is sign-in against sign-in. At 1,000,000 webhook messages, Svix Professional bills $490 plus 950,000 extra messages at $0.0001, which is $585.

What the arithmetic does and does not show

• If you only need sign-in for a few thousand users, Clerk Hobby at $0 or Pro at $25 beats any plan of ours. We come out ahead only when you also want custom roles, and by more if you would otherwise add a webhook service with a DPA and a scheduler.
• The gap between Clerk with custom roles ($125) and ours ($110.83) is small. What you are choosing between is mostly where the data lives and which screens you want to write.
• Taken one by one, the free tiers are cheaper than we are: Clerk Hobby, Svix Free and cron-job.org are $0 each.