Organizations

Organizations let you group users with Roles and Permissions. This lets you build multi-tenant B2B apps like Slack (workspaces), Linear (teams), or Vercel (projects) where users switch between different team contexts.

Users can belong to multiple Organizations, and Clerk provides the Organization context (memberships, Roles, and the Active Organization) in each session. You can then use this context to control what data to show and what actions to allow.

How do Organizations work?

Organizations live within your Clerk application. Each application can contain multiple Organizations, and each Organization can have multiple users. You define Roles and Permissions once at the application level, and they apply across all Organizations within that application.

The Organization that a user is currently viewing is called the Active Organization. The Active Organization determines which Organization-specific data the user can access and which Role and related Permissions they have within the Organization.

Clerk measures Organization usage through Monthly Active Organizations (MAOs). An MAO is an Organization with at least two users that have signed in that month, where at least one has interacted with the Organization during the current billing cycle. Free plans include up to 50 MAOs in development and 100 in production. Pro plans offer unlimited development MAOs and start at 100 free production MAOs, then $1 per additional MAO. Refer to the pricing page⁠ for complete details.

Core workflow

The core workflow when working with Organizations can follow something along the lines of:

1. Create: You can create Organizations in the Clerk Dashboard⁠, or end users can create them in your application through prebuilt components or APIs. Each Organization has a profile, settings, and metadata. Users can belong to multiple Organizations and switch between them with the <OrganizationSwitcher/> component. Learn more about creating and managing Organizations.

2. Add members: You can add members to Organizations in different ways depending on your needs:

   • Invitations for bottom-up adoption, where individual users invite teammates with precise control over roles.
   • Verified Domains for company-wide rollouts, where Clerk automatically invites users with matching email domains (who can join immediately) or suggests they join (requiring admin approval).
   • Enterprise Connections (SAML or OIDC) for top-down deployments managed by IT with centralized authentication through an Identity Provider (IdP).

   You can combine these approaches: use manual invitations for external contractors alongside domain-based enrollment for employees. The Active Organization determines which members and Roles apply to the current context.

3. Control access: You can manage access to content or entire pages using Roles and Permissions. Default admin and member Roles cover common cases, while custom Roles and Permissions provide fine-grained access for more complex needs. You can perform authorization checks⁠ in both frontend and backend code.

Beyond these core steps, you can also monitor Organization health and growth with analytics in the Clerk Dashboard. This helps you spot which Organizations are growing, staying active, or dropping off, so you know what's working and where you might need attention.

Next steps

Now that you understand what Organizations are and how they work, here's how to implement them:

• Configure Organization settings
• Create and manage Organizations
• Invite members
• Set up Roles and Permissions