Clerk vs Cursor

Clerk's Hobby plan is free with a 50,000 MRU limit; Pro is $25/month ($20/month billed annually), Business is $300/month ($250 annually), and Enterprise uses custom annual pricing.

The free Hobby plan provides 2,000 completions per month and 50 slow premium requests, with access to basic autocomplete features. Codebase-wide indexing and the Composer multi-file editor are not available on the free plan.

Yes, the Hobby plan is free with a 50,000 monthly retained user (MRU) limit per app, up to 3 dashboard seats, and unlimited applications, with no credit card required.

While Cursor can open and edit files locally, its AI features including autocomplete, chat, agents, and codebase-aware reasoning require internet access to cloud-hosted models.

Clerk meters by monthly retained users (MRUs) — users who return to the app at least a day after signing up — with overage billed at $0.02 per MRU beyond the included 50,000 on paid plans.

Cursor can integrate with local models, but requests still route through Cursor's backend for prompt building. True localhost mode without external endpoints is not supported. The paid plan ($20+/month) is required to use local models.

Cursor offers Privacy Mode (enabled on paid Team plans) which prevents customer data from being used for model training, with zero data retention agreements with all AI providers. When disabled, Cursor may use codebase data to improve features.

Pro ($20/month) includes unlimited completions and 500 fast premium requests, while Pro+ ($60/month) provides 3x those request limits, priority feature access, and extended Agent capabilities.

SSO with SAML/OIDC is included on Teams Standard ($40/user/month) and higher plans, with full team administration and audit logs.