Tesseral vs. Clerk for B2B SaaS User Management
Building a B2B SaaS app? Choosing how you manage authentication and user management is an important foundational infrastructure decision. Your auth stack affects onboarding, security, enterprise-readiness, and how easily you can scale.
Both Tesseral and Clerk offer modern authentication platforms, but they’re optimized for very different kinds of products. Clerk is best for frontend-heavy, consumer-style apps, while Tesseral is designed specifically for B2B SaaS products that need organizations, roles, SSO, and control over deployment.
This post breaks down the key differences between the two and helps you choose the platform that fits your product best.
What is Tesseral?
Tesseral is an open source, developer-first user management platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. It includes authentication, authorization, organization management, and enterprise features like SAML SSO and SCIM, all in a few lines of code.
Key Features:
- SAML and OIDC SSO
- SCIM provisioning and org-level policies
- User invites, RBAC, impersonation, and audit logs
- Scoped API keys your customers can generate and revoke
- Self-service SSO configuration
- Clean console UI for managing orgs and roles
- Deployment flexibility
- Self-hosted: run Tesseral in your own cloud (for compliance, control, privacy, etc.)
- Bring-your-own-cloud: run Tesseral in your cloud, with setup and maintenance handled by our team
- Dedicated: use a private instance of Tesseral running on our cloud
- Managed: use Tesseral like a typical multi-tenant SaaS and get started in minutes
Tesseral helps B2B SaaS companies move quickly while staying enterprise-ready, with no unnecessary frontend assumptions.
What is Clerk?
Clerk is a hosted authentication platform focused on frontend frameworks like React, Next.js, and Expo. It includes prebuilt UI components (sign-up forms, user nav menus, etc.) and supports consumer-style features like social login, SMS login, and passwordless flows.
Clerk can work well for teams who are building modern web apps and want to drop in a UI-first auth experience without worrying about wiring up low-level flows.
Choosing What’s Right For You
For B2B SaaS, Tesseral is the better option. Clerk is a great product, but it’s primarily designed for and used by B2C web applications.
| Category | Tesseral | Clerk |
|---|---|---|
| Designed For | B2B SaaS (orgs, roles, SSO, SCIM) | Primarily B2C / frontend-first web apps |
| Additional Products | None. 100% focused on B2B user management and auth | Billing software |
| Audit Logs | Included out of the box | Available on higher pricing tiers |
| RBAC | Advanced functionality, including tenant-defined custom roles | Basic functionality |
| Enterprise SSO | Included out of the box | Available on higher pricing tiers |
| API Keys | Yes | No |
| SCIM Provisioning | Included out of the box | No |
| Open Source | Yes | No |
| Self-Hosting Option | Yes | No |
Get started with Tesseral here.
Questions? Speak with a founder.
