Clerk vs Neon
Clerk and Neon are both developer tools tools aimed at developers. Both have a free plan.
| Pricing | Freemium · $25 | Freemium |
| Starting price | $25/mo | Not published |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Built for | Developers | Developers |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | US · 2019 | US · 2021 |
| 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 Neon if
Developers who want elastic Postgres with branching and are comfortable assembling the rest of the stack.
- Branching changes development workflows
- Pay only for compute you use
- Fast provisioning, great for AI agents and previews
Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting an all-in-one backend (Supabase) or steady high-throughput workloads where reserved instances are cheaper.
Clerk vs Neon 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
Neon
- Free$0100 CU-hours and 1 GB storage per project, 100 projects
- Launch$0.106/CU-hourUsage-based, no minimum; storage $0.35/GB-month; 7-day restore
- Scale$0.222/CU-hourUsage-based; 30-day restore; SOC 2, HIPAA, SLA
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
Neon · Key features
- Serverless Postgres with scale-to-zero and autoscaling
- Instant database branching for previews and testing
- Point-in-time restore and time travel queries
- Postgres extensions including pgvector
- Connection pooling and HTTP driver for edge runtimes
- API for programmatic project and branch creation
Cons
- Cold starts after autosuspend
- Costs can surprise at sustained high compute
- Database only; bring your own auth and storage
Clerk vs Neon: FAQ
Do Clerk and Neon have a free plan?
Yes, both Clerk and Neon have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.