Both Clerk and ZITADEL Cloud offer free tiers. Clerk provides "Hobby" while ZITADEL Cloud offers "Free".
A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. A badge carrying a date states the record it rests on; a badge with no date rests on no record in force.
A turnkey user and access management that works for you and supports multi-tenant (B2B) use cases. Free for up to 100 Daily Active Users, with all security features (no paywall for OTP, Passwordless, Policies, and so on).
Pro costs US$100 per month. It includes 25,000 Daily Active Users a month, 500,000 Management API requests, 3 identity providers and a custom domain. Usage is invoiced at the end of each billing cycle with no monthly commitment. (From zitadel.com/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
ZITADEL sums each day's active users for the month. A user is active on a day when they log in or refresh a token, and a service user when it authenticates. Each user counts at most once per day. A user active on 20 days counts as 20. (From help.zitadel.com/how-is-daily-active-users-calculated, read 2026-10-29.)
ZITADEL's terms say a free plan with no Daily Active User for 30 days is terminated automatically. (From zitadel.com/docs/legal/terms-of-service, read 2026-10-30.)
When an agreement is terminated, ZITADEL may irrevocably delete all of the customer's data. (From zitadel.com/docs/legal/terms-of-service, read 2026-10-30.)
Pricing Change History
Clerk
No recorded pricing changes for Clerk.
ZITADEL Cloud
No recorded pricing changes for ZITADEL Cloud.
Watch Both Vendors for Pricing Changes
We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.