Happy Valley

Clerk vs Dynatrace

Clerk and Dynatrace are both security & identity tools. Clerk is aimed at developers, while Dynatrace is aimed at enterprise and developers. Only Clerk has a free plan.

Clerk

Drop-in authentication and user management

Dynatrace

AI-driven observability and app security for large cloud estates

PricingFreemium · $25Paid
Starting price$25/moNot published
Free planYesNo
Free trial—15 days
Built forDevelopersEnterprise, Developers
Platformswebweb
CountryUS · 2019US · 2005
Rating——

Choose Clerk if

React and Next.js teams who want production auth with great UX immediately.

  • Beautiful components save weeks of work
  • Generous free tier
  • Organizations and B2B features built in

Look elsewhere if: Teams requiring full ownership of auth data (Better Auth, Keycloak) or non-JS stacks.

Choose Dynatrace if

Large enterprises running complex hybrid or Kubernetes environments that want automatic instrumentation and AI root-cause analysis.

  • Automatic discovery and instrumentation save weeks of manual setup
  • Root-cause analysis cuts alert noise better than threshold-based tools
  • One platform covers APM, infrastructure, logs, RUM and runtime security

Look elsewhere if: Startups and small teams that need a cheap, self-serve monitoring tool (Datadog, New Relic or Grafana Cloud are easier entry points).

Clerk vs Dynatrace pricing

Clerk

  • Hobby$050,000 monthly retained users per app, 3 dashboard seats
  • Pro$25/mo$20/mo billed annually; 50k MRUs, then from $0.02/MRU
  • Business$300/mo$250/mo billed annually; 10 dashboard seats
  • EnterpriseCustomAnnual billing; 99.99% uptime SLA, volume discounts

Dynatrace

  • Foundation & Discovery$7/host/moBasic host health and discovery; billed per host-hour
  • Infrastructure Monitoring$29/host/moHosts, processes and networks; $0.04 per host-hour
  • Full-Stack Monitoring$58/8 GiB host/moAPM, tracing, code-level analysis; Kubernetes pods included
  • Log Analytics$0.20/GiBIngest price; retention and queries billed separately or bundled
  • Real User Monitoring$2.25/1,000 sessions$4.50 per 1,000 with Session Replay; 35-day retention

Clerk · Key features

  • Prebuilt UI components for auth and user profile
  • Email, password, passkeys, OTP and 20+ social providers
  • Organizations, roles and permissions (B2B)
  • MFA, bot protection and session management
  • Clerk Billing for subscriptions and feature gating
  • SDKs for Next.js, React, Remix, Expo, Astro and more

Cons

  • User data lives with a third party
  • Per-user (MRU) cost grows with scale
  • Enhanced features (SAML, MFA) cost extra

Dynatrace · Key features

  • OneAgent auto-instruments hosts, containers, processes and code with one install
  • Smartscape topology map of live service and infrastructure dependencies
  • Grail data lakehouse for logs, metrics, traces and events queried with DQL
  • Causal AI that collapses alert storms into a single root-cause problem
  • Real user monitoring with session replay and synthetic browser checks
  • Runtime vulnerability analytics and application protection on monitored hosts

Cons

  • Requires an annual spend commitment, so not suited to small teams
  • Consumption pricing across many meters is hard to forecast
  • DQL and the platform's breadth take real time to learn

Clerk vs Dynatrace: FAQ

Do Clerk and Dynatrace have a free plan?

Clerk has a free plan. Dynatrace has no free plan, a 15-day free trial.

Not sure yet?