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 in each session (memberships, roles, and the active organization). Your application uses 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. Users can switch between organizations using the <OrganizationSwitcher /> component.

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 consists of three stages:

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.

2. Invite: You can bring people into organizations in different ways depending on your needs:

   • Invitations for bottoms-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 (for example: SSO, SAML, 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: You manage access through 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.

Why Organizations?

Organizations help you build multi-tenant applications faster, support team collaboration at scale, and provide enterprise-grade access control. This model is especially valuable for B2B2C products in a growth stage and B2C products expanding into B2B.

Enable secure team collaboration

Modern applications need to support users who work across multiple teams or client accounts. Organizations provide the structure for this multi-tenant usage while keeping data boundaries clear. Users can switch between organizations without auth or data leakage between tenants. Each organization maintains its own settings, roles, and members, while users can belong to multiple organizations with a single account.

Automate team enrollment

Managing who can join an organization becomes easier when you can set enrollment rules. Verified domains let you automatically invite or suggest organizations to users with approved company emails. When a user signs up with a matching email domain, they can join the organization without manual approval. This streamlines onboarding for company-wide rollouts and reduces friction for IT administrators.

For B2B2C SaaS onboarding entire companies, verified domains handle the scale. When Acme Corp adopts your product, all @acme.com employees automatically join their company's organization without manual invitations.

Support enterprise authentication

Large customers often require centralized authentication through their identity provider. Organization-level SSO lets members authenticate with SAML or OIDC protocols through providers like Okta, Entra ID, and Google Workspace. When users sign in through their IdP, Clerk automatically adds them to the organization with the appropriate role. This satisfies enterprise security requirements and maintains existing identity workflows.

As B2C products scale into enterprise customers, SSO becomes essential. Products that started with individual email sign-ups need to evolve to support IT-managed authentication for Fortune 500 buyers.

Control access with roles and permissions

Organizations support role-based access control (RBAC) so the right people can do the right work. Default admin and member roles cover common cases, and custom roles and permissions let you create fine-grained access that maps to your features and teams. Clerk embeds the active organization's roles and permissions in the session, enabling you to perform authorization checks without extra network requests.

Monitor organization growth

The Clerk Dashboard provides comprehensive organization growth tracking with the same level of insight you have for user growth. Track new, reactivated, retained, and churned organizations over time with detailed analytics. The organization growth chart shows activity breakdowns across each period, and you can analyze data across different time periods to see daily, weekly, or monthly active organizations. A detailed cohort table lets you drill into individual organizations and investigate specific trends by clicking chart segments.

For B2B products, organization-level analytics reveal which customer accounts are growing or churning. This helps you understand product-market fit at the account level, not just individual usage.

Monetize with subscription plans

Clerk's billing for B2B lets you create subscription plans and manage payments for organizations. You can gate features behind specific plans, ensuring organizations only access functionality they've subscribed to. Billing integrates directly with roles and permissions, so when you create custom permissions tied to features, those permissions only work if the organization's active plan includes that feature. This makes it easy to build tiered pricing models where higher-tier plans unlock additional capabilities.

Next steps

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

• Configure global settings
• Create and manage organizations
• Invite members
• Set up roles and permissions