Faable Auth vs Auth0, Clerk & Keycloak

Short answer: Faable Auth is a managed, multi-tenant identity server built on OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect — the same category as Auth0, a standards-first alternative to Clerk, and a way to get Keycloak’s protocol coverage without running Keycloak. What sets it apart: no per-user pricing — 15,000 MAU free with no credit card, unlimited MAU on every paid plan — instead of per-user and per-organization add-ons; hosted login pages on every plan; identities held by a European company on its own hardware in Europe; and the same subscription as Faable Deploy.

Each option below is a strong identity solution; this page helps you pick by priorities.

Competitor details checked against each vendor’s pricing and docs in September 2026. They change often — confirm anything decisive on their own sites.

At a glance

Pricing, worked through

The three managed products price in very different shapes, so the fair comparison is by what you need, not by headline rate.

• Auth0 is free up to 25,000 MAU with most features in reduced quantities (5 organizations, 1 enterprise connection, 1,000 M2M tokens a month, 5 Actions, one day of logs). Paid tiers start at $35/month for consumer apps and $150/month for B2B, rise with MAU, and Professional starts at $240 / $800. Enterprise connections are $100/month each, and more M2M tokens are a separate add-on.
• Clerk is free up to 50,000 retained users per app, then $25/month on Pro with $0.02 per retained user above 50,000. Organizations beyond 100 need the $100/month B2B add-on and a per-organization price; M2M tokens and API keys are metered per creation and per verification.
• Keycloak has no license fee. You pay for the servers, a PostgreSQL database, the upgrades — 26.x has shipped a minor version every few months — and the people who know how to run it.
• Faable Auth never charges per user: Free up to 15,000 MAU with no credit card, Hobby 15 € and Pro 99 € with no MAU limit. Machine-to-machine tokens: 100 a month included, then €2.25 per 1,000 on Hobby and Pro. See Auth pricing.

The reading: up to 15,000 monthly users, Faable costs nothing and asks for no card. Past that, Hobby is 15 € with no user limit — where Auth0’s paid tiers rise with every user and Clerk charges $0.02 per user above 50,000. Faable pulls ahead when you’re B2B (organizations and SSO are where the others charge), when you’re past their free tiers, or when a predictable bill matters more than a per-user one.

Hosted login pages

All four host the login; they differ in what you can change and what it takes.

• Auth0 Universal Login is the most customizable: no-code branding and text in the dashboard, Liquid page templates, or your own React app with Auth0 running the flow. The last two require a custom domain.
• Clerk splits it in two: the hosted Account Portal, which “cannot be customized beyond the options provided in the Clerk Dashboard”, and prebuilt React components you embed for full control. Production requires a domain you own.
• Keycloak renders every screen from a theme — FreeMarker templates and CSS, or React through community tooling like Keycloakify. Anything is possible, and you maintain it across upgrades.
• Faable Auth hosts every screen — sign-in, sign-up, reset, two-step verification, passkey enrolment and the offer right after login, a security page where users manage their own factors, and device activation for CLIs. You set the logo, the methods and their order, email-first and remember-me, per account or per client. You can’t restyle the pages beyond that — if pixel-level design control is the requirement, Auth0 or Clerk’s components are the better fit.

CLI and config-as-code

• Auth0 has the most complete tooling: the auth0 CLI (users, apps, Actions, logs tail, test login), the Deploy CLI for tenant config in YAML, and an official Terraform provider.
• Clerk’s clerk CLI is built for getting started and developing: framework setup, listing and creating users, impersonation links and a local webhook relay. There is no official Terraform provider.
• Keycloak has kcadm.sh for everything the admin API does, and kc.sh export/import to move whole realms — with the cluster stopped.
• faable auth is built for operating a live tenant: query users with FaableQL filters, suspend or reinstate them in bulk from a pipe, ship Actions from a file and switch them off without a deploy, create clients, and read the audit trail.

faable auth users list --query email_verified:false --json \
  | jq -r '.[].id' | faable auth users suspend -y -r "unverified batch"
faable auth actions update action_xyz -f ./gate.js
faable auth logs list --origin oauth --status failed --since 2026-09-23

There’s no Terraform provider or declarative config export for Faable Auth yet; configuration as code goes through the Management API. If that’s central to how you work, Auth0 is ahead.

Where your users’ data lives

• Auth0 offers an EU region (data in AWS Frankfurt and Dublin); it is part of Okta, a US company.
• Clerk says plainly that it “does not offer regional data residency or region selection” — data is in the US, with EU transfers under the Data Privacy Framework.
• Keycloak lives wherever you run it.
• Faable Auth runs on our own hardware in a European datacenter, operated by a European company, with no non-EU region. For SOC 2 or ISO 27001, see our compliance scope or ask sales.

Migrating to Faable

There are step-by-step guides for Auth0, Clerk and Keycloak. The concepts map closely — Auth0 tenant → Faable account, application → client, API → API, Action → Action.

Users keep their passwords: Faable imports bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2 and Argon2id hashes on every plan, with faable auth users import — see Import and export password hashes. Getting the hashes out is its own hurdle at the source: Auth0 only exports them through a support ticket, and not on its Free tier.

When Faable Auth is the better fit

• You need European data sovereignty from the company, not just the region.
• You’re building B2B and don’t want users, organizations and SSO priced as separate meters.
• You don’t want to operate auth infrastructure — the main cost of self-hosting Keycloak.
• You want hosted pages that cover the whole lifecycle, including a security page and a passkey nudge, without building a theme.
• You want auth and hosting together. Faable Deploy and Faable Auth share one subscription.

When another tool might fit better

• Auth0 has the deepest feature surface and tooling (Terraform, Deploy CLI, adaptive MFA, SAML as IdP) — a fit for enterprises already standardized on Okta.
• Clerk has excellent React components for teams that want to design the auth UI inside their app and are happy with US hosting.
• Keycloak is the choice when you want open-source identity on your own infrastructure and have the team to operate it.
• You need SAML, SMS login or Sign in with Apple today. All three have them; Faable Auth doesn’t yet.

Other alternatives at a glance

How Faable Auth works

Four concepts model the whole product: Accounts (your tenant), Connections (sources of users), Clients (your apps), and Users & Teams. Add login with the @faable/auth-js SDK or a framework quickstart, and call the Management API from your backend with client credentials.

See Get Started with Faable Auth, or learn the concept first in What is a multi-tenant identity server?.

Last updated on September 24, 2026