Do coding agents recommend Clerk?
Clerk was chosen in 12% of 724 judged authentication sessions, ranking third. Measured with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code.
Clerk was chosen in 12% of 724 judged authentication sessions, ranking third. It was also raised as a candidate in 306 further sessions without being chosen.
This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code had to solve a problem in authentication inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Clerk. What an agent actually installed.
The numbers
| Category | Authentication |
| Sessions in the category | 724 |
| Sessions where Clerk was chosen | 86 |
| Install share | 12% |
| Rank in category | 3 of 28 |
| Codebases it won in | 5 |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 306 |
| Chosen when considered | 22% |
| Site | clerk.com |
By agent
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code agree closely on Clerk, choosing it at rates within 5 points of each other.
| Agent | Sessions | Chose Clerk | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 133 | 12 | 9% |
| Codex | 204 | 28 | 14% |
| Cursor | 133 | 15 | 11% |
| Grok Build CLI | 50 | 5 | 10% |
| Muse Code | 204 | 26 | 13% |
By who was asking
Clerk does much better with one kind of buyer than another. It won 20% of sessions asked as junior developer and 0% of those asked as enterprise team.
| Who is asking | Sessions | Chose Clerk | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe coder | 98 | 0 | 0% |
| Junior developer | 223 | 45 | 20% |
| Senior engineer | 243 | 41 | 17% |
| Enterprise team | 160 | 0 | 0% |
What Clerk was up against
The full ranking in authentication, from the same sessions:
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Auth0 | 180 | 25% |
| 2 | WorkOS AuthKit | 131 | 18% |
| 3 | Clerk (this page) | 86 | 12% |
| 4 | Microsoft Entra ID | 80 | 11% |
| 5 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 65 | 9% |
| 6 | Better Auth | 29 | 4% |
| 7 | Amazon Cognito | 23 | 3% |
| 8 | Keycloak | 22 | 3% |
What this means
This is an integration problem, not a presence problem. Agents raised Clerk in 306 sessions and chose it in 86, so it reaches the shortlist and then loses. Something at the last step is costing the session, and in our data that is usually a quickstart that does not run when pasted, documentation describing an interface that changed, or a package name that does not match the product name.
That is the cheaper of the two problems to have. The reason is written down in each losing transcript.
Where these numbers come from
The 724 sessions in authentication are part of a published set of 15,287, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.
Every authentication run can be replayed on the board.
If you work on Clerk: the judge recorded a reason for every session where it was raised and passed over. Those reasons are in the transcripts.
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Common questions
Do coding agents recommend Clerk?
Yes. Clerk was chosen in 86 of the 724 judged sessions in authentication, a 12% install share, ranking third in its category.
Does Claude Code recommend Clerk?
In 12 of the 133 sessions in authentication run with Claude Code, which is 9%.
Do different coding agents treat Clerk differently?
Not much. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code chose it at similar rates, between 9% and 14% of their runs.
How was this measured?
Real coding agents at pinned versions were run in sandboxes inside 110 realistic codebases and asked to solve real tasks. A simulated project owner approved or questioned each recommendation before any code was written, and a judge from a model family that builds none of the agents read every session blind.
How often is Clerk considered but not chosen?
It was raised as a candidate in 306 sessions without being chosen, and chosen in 86. That is a 22% conversion from considered to chosen.
Where this comes from
Armature ran 15,287 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code inside 110 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.