The best Okta alternatives, compared honestly
Okta is a good product with an awkward price list and one detail almost every comparison leaves out: the most-recommended alternative to Okta is owned by Okta. Auth0 was acquired in 2021 and is sold as Okta Customer Identity Cloud, so moving there changes the product, not the vendor. The other thing that decides this category is not features, because everyone does SAML and OIDC now. It is the billing unit. Okta counts users per month with a $1,500 annual contract minimum, Zitadel counts daily active users, WorkOS counts SSO connections, Logto counts access tokens, and Keycloak counts nothing. Same organisation, wildly different quotes.
Pick by whose logins you are handling, then check the unit you get billed in:
- Employees, self-hosted → Keycloak: Apache-2.0, no meter, proper SAML and LDAP.
- Self-hosted with a support contract → authentik: $5 per internal user, $0.02 per external.
- A consumer or SaaS product → Logto free to 50,000 MAU, or Zitadel at $100 for 25,000 daily active users.
- Selling SSO to enterprise customers → WorkOS: 1M MAU free, $125 per connection.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off Okta
Rarely the technology. Three of the four patterns below are about how the contract is shaped, and the fourth is about what happens when your entire login estate sits behind one vendor.
The annual minimum punishes small teams
Workforce Identity carries a $1,500 annual contract minimum. At the Starter list price of $6 per user per month, that minimum is only "filled" at about 21 users. A 10-person company pays an effective $12.50 per user per month, more than double list, and cannot buy at list price at all.
The price list stops before your tier
Starter $6, Core Essentials $14, Essentials $17, then Professional and Enterprise become "inquire for pricing". Customer Identity is a separate product with a $3,000 a month base platform and quote-only B2C and B2B suites. Budgeting above the entry tier means a sales call.
The obvious escape route is the same company
Teams unhappy with Workforce Identity are usually pointed at Auth0. Okta bought it in 2021. That may still be the right product for customer-facing logins, but it is not vendor diversification, and the roadmap and the risk stay in one place.
One vendor holds every door
Per Okta's own security writeup, a 2023 support-system intrusion exposed files for 134 customers and session tokens were used to hijack sessions at 5. Okta disclosed and remediated it publicly, which is the right behaviour. The lesson generalises: any identity provider is a single point of failure for every login you own.
The shortlist
6 Okta alternatives worth evaluating
Ranked for the most common case, replacing employee SSO, with the consumer-identity and sell-SSO-to-customers cases called out where they win instead. Every pick lists one honest strength and one real weakness.
Apache-2.0, 35,961 GitHub stars, commits landing daily, and the protocol coverage enterprises actually need: SAML 2.0, OIDC, and federation against LDAP or Active Directory. There is no per-user meter and no vendor SaaS, so the licence question never comes back. Weakness: you own upgrades, high availability, the database and the on-call rota, and support means Red Hat's supported build or a community forum.
The free self-hosted core covers OIDC, SAML, LDAP, SCIM, RADIUS, Kerberos and a forward-auth proxy, and Enterprise is $5 per internal user per month plus $0.02 per external user, which is the rare pricing model that matches how identity is actually used. Service accounts are free, and the project states features only ever move from paid into open source, never the other way. Weakness: Enterprise Plus starts at $20,000 a year, and the repo is an open core plus a separate enterprise licence, so check the terms for the specific feature you need.
AGPL-3.0 with a hosted tier at $100 a month for 25,000 daily active users, free for the first 100, and data residency in the EU, US, Switzerland or Australia. For an app people open weekly rather than hourly, the DAU unit is dramatically cheaper than anything counting registrations. Weakness: self-hosting the managed feature set sits in the Enterprise tier, and AGPL-3.0 needs a licence conversation if you embed it in a product you ship.
MPL-2.0, free to 50,000 monthly active users with 3 applications, and Pro at $24 a month with unlimited MAU. Billing counts access tokens only, not ID or refresh tokens, which is unusually developer-friendly accounting. Weakness: the headline is cheap because B2B features are add-ons. MFA $48, Organizations $48, enterprise SSO $48 per connector and SAML apps $96 each add up fast.
Different problem, different meter: the first 1 million monthly active users are free, and you pay $125 per enterprise SSO connection per month, dropping to $100 above 15 connections and $50 above 100. Directory Sync is priced the same way. If your roadmap item is "enterprise customer wants SAML and SCIM", this is the shortest path. Weakness: no self-hosting, and the cost scales with your enterprise customer count, so five of them is $625 a month before anything else.
Genuinely the most polished developer experience here, free to 25,000 monthly active users, and a better fit than Workforce Identity for customer-facing logins. B2C Essentials starts at $35 for 500 MAU; B2B Essentials at $150 with 3 SSO connections and $100 a month per additional one. Weakness, stated plainly: Okta owns it, MAU bands mean exceeding one bills you at the next band up, and yearly billing is 11 times monthly rather than a deeper discount.
Also evaluated and left off to keep the comparison sharp: Ory Kratos (Apache-2.0, 13,806 stars), SuperTokens (15,241 stars) and Casdoor (Apache-2.0, 14,114 stars). All three are active and worth a look; the six above already cover every distinct billing shape.
Side by side
Okta alternatives compared
Prices as of August 2026, from each vendor's own pricing page. The column that decides most migrations is what you are billed for, because the same organisation looks cheap in one unit and expensive in another. Okta's own row is the baseline.
| Platform | What you're billed for | Free tier | Entry paid price | Self-host / licence | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Okta Workforce | Users per month, $1,500 annual minimum | ✗ trial only | $6/user Starter, $17 Essentials | ✗ proprietary SaaS | Large employee estates with procurement in place |
| Keycloak | ✓ nothing | ✓ everything, unmetered | None; Red Hat sells support | ✓ Apache-2.0 | Employee SSO without a per-user meter |
| authentik | Internal vs external users | ✓ full self-hosted core | $5 internal, $0.02 external per user | ✓ open core plus enterprise licence | Self-hosting with a support contract |
| Zitadel | Daily active users | 100 DAU | $100/mo for 25,000 DAU | ✓ AGPL-3.0 | Apps people open weekly, not hourly |
| Logto | Access tokens | ✓ 50,000 MAU | $24/mo Pro, features as add-ons | ✓ MPL-2.0 | Product teams starting cheap |
| WorkOS | SSO connections | ✓ 1,000,000 MAU | $125 per connection per month | ✗ proprietary SaaS | Shipping SAML and SCIM to enterprise buyers |
| Auth0 | MAU bands, owned by Okta | 25,000 MAU | $35/mo B2C, $150/mo B2B at 500 MAU | ✗ proprietary SaaS | Customer-facing logins, same vendor |
Numbers that do not fit in cells: Okta Customer Identity is a separate product with a $3,000 a month base platform on the Enterprise tier, and Okta Professional and Enterprise are quote-only. authentik Enterprise Plus starts at $20,000 a year. WorkOS drops to $100 per connection above 15, $80 above 30, $65 above 50 and $50 above 100, and additional millions of MAU are $2,500 a month each. Auth0 yearly billing is 11 times the monthly price, and exceeding a MAU band bills you at the next band. Logto Pro add-ons: MFA $48, Organizations $48, global RBAC $32, enterprise SSO $48 per connector, SAML apps $96 each. GitHub stars: Keycloak 35,961, authentik 22,583, Zitadel 14,624, Logto 14,278. Pricing changes often; check each vendor for current terms. Compiled August 2026.
Official pages: Okta · Keycloak · authentik · Zitadel · Logto · WorkOS · Auth0 · Okta on the 2023 support incident
A fair call
When Okta is still the right choice
Identity is the one system where an outage locks every employee out of every application at once, so "cheaper" has to survive that sentence. There are organisations for which Okta's price is the correct answer.
Okta is still right if…
- You need the integration catalogue. Thousands of pre-built app integrations with SCIM provisioning already mapped is genuinely hard to replicate, and each one you wire by hand costs engineering time.
- Compliance or a customer contract requires a named vendor with attestations, a support SLA and an audited environment. FedRAMP High and DoD IL4 environments exist here and mostly do not elsewhere on this list.
- Nobody on your team wants to be paged at 3am because the login service is down. That is a real and legitimate reason to pay someone else.
- Lifecycle management is the actual requirement. Automated joiner, mover and leaver flows across dozens of systems are the part self-hosted stacks underestimate most.
Look elsewhere if…
- You are under about 20 employees: the $1,500 annual minimum means paying double list price for the privilege. Keycloak or authentik cost nothing at that size.
- Your users are customers rather than staff, and there are a lot of them: Logto is free to 50,000 MAU and Zitadel $100 for 25,000 DAU.
- What you actually need is to let your enterprise customers log in with their own IdP: that is WorkOS, and Okta Workforce is the wrong product entirely.
- Data residency or air-gapped operation is a hard requirement: self-hosting is the only answer, and two of the options here are free.
Common questions
Common questions about Okta alternatives
What is the best Okta alternative in 2026?
It depends on whose logins you are handling. For employees, Keycloak is the strongest replacement: Apache-2.0, no licence meter, and SAML, OIDC and LDAP or Active Directory federation done properly, with roughly 36,000 GitHub stars and daily commits. If you want the same self-hosted shape with a commercial support path, authentik charges $5 per internal user per month and $0.02 per external user. For a consumer or SaaS product, Logto is free to 50,000 monthly active users and Zitadel is $100 a month for 25,000 daily active users. If the actual requirement is selling SAML to enterprise customers, WorkOS is built for that and gives you a million monthly active users free.
How much does Okta cost in 2026?
Okta Workforce Identity is billed per user per month with annual billing and a $1,500 annual contract minimum. The published tiers are Starter at $6, which includes SSO, MFA and Universal Directory with lifecycle management as an add-on, Core Essentials at $14, and Essentials at $17. Professional and Enterprise are quote-only. Okta Customer Identity is a separate product whose base platform is $3,000 a month on the Enterprise tier, with the B2C and B2B suites custom-priced.
Is Auth0 an alternative to Okta?
Not in the sense most people mean. Okta acquired Auth0 in 2021 and sells it as Okta Customer Identity Cloud, so moving from Okta to Auth0 changes the product and the billing unit but keeps the same vendor, the same company roadmap and the same concentration of risk. It can still be the right move, because Auth0 is developer-friendly, has a free tier up to 25,000 monthly active users, and is a better fit than Workforce Identity for customer-facing logins. Just do not count it as vendor diversification.
Is self-hosted SSO actually cheaper than Okta?
The licence is free and the operation is not. Keycloak and the authentik core cost nothing to run and have no per-user meter, which for a few hundred employees removes a five-figure annual bill. Against that you own upgrades, high availability, the database, backups and the on-call rota for a service that, when it is down, locks every employee out of every application at once. Teams that already run Postgres and Kubernetes with real on-call tend to find it clearly cheaper. Teams without that foundation are trading a predictable invoice for an unpredictable outage.
Why does the billing unit matter so much when comparing these?
Because every vendor in this category counts something different, and the same organisation gets wildly different quotes depending on which unit it is measured in. Okta counts users per month. Auth0 counts monthly active users in bands. Zitadel counts daily active users, so an app people open once a week costs a fraction of a daily-use app with the same signups. WorkOS mostly counts enterprise SSO connections, at $125 each per month, and gives away the first million monthly active users. Logto counts access tokens. Keycloak counts nothing. Model your own numbers in each unit before comparing headline prices.
What happened in the Okta 2023 support breach?
Per Okta's own security writeup, between 28 September and 17 October 2023 a threat actor accessed files in Okta's customer support case management system belonging to 134 customers, which Okta put at under 1% of its customer base. Some of those were HAR files containing session tokens, and the tokens were used to hijack sessions at 5 customers. The root cause Okta published was a service account stored inside the support system itself with permission to view and update support cases. It is worth reading as an argument about failure domains rather than about one vendor: any identity provider is a single point of failure for every login you own.