Okta vs Zitadel
Both do OIDC and SAML 2.0, both do multi-factor authentication, both have an admin API. The interesting difference is arithmetic: Okta bills per user per month with a $1,500 annual contract minimum, and Zitadel bills per daily active user, at $100 a month for 25,000 of them. Those two units turn the same user base into wildly different invoices, and which way the gap runs depends on one thing nobody puts in a feature table: how often your users actually log in.
Pick Zitadel for the users of an application you build, especially one people open weekly rather than hourly, where a large registered base collapses into a small daily figure, and where a published $100 price beats Okta Customer Identity's $3,000 monthly base. Stay on Okta for employee single sign-on with a big SaaS catalogue and lifecycle automation, since that is the half Zitadel does not try to be.
Side by side
Okta vs Zitadel at a glance
| Okta | Zitadel | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | ✗ proprietary SaaS | ✓ AGPL-3.0 |
| What you're billed for | Users per month | Daily active users |
| Free tier | ✗ none | ✓ 100 daily active users |
| Entry paid price | Starter $6 per user per month | Pro $100 a month, 25,000 DAU included |
| Contract minimum | $1,500 a year | ✓ none |
| Customer-identity entry price | $3,000 a month base, Enterprise tier | $100 a month |
| Published price ceiling | Essentials $17, then quote-only | Pro published, Enterprise custom |
| SAML 2.0 and OIDC | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-tenancy for your customers | Customer Identity product | ✓ organisations, built in |
| Audit trail | ✓ system log | ✓ event-sourced by design |
| Self-hosting | ✗ | ✓ AGPL, or Enterprise in your infra |
| Data region choice | Vendor regions | EU, US, Switzerland, Australia |
| Uptime commitment | Contractual | 99.99% on Enterprise |
| Employee SSO app catalogue | ✓ large | ✗ configure by protocol |
| Lifecycle automation | ✓ Workflows | ✗ API, you build it |
| Best for | Staff SSO bought as a finished service | Product logins where users do not visit daily |
Sources: Okta pricing · Zitadel pricing · Zitadel on GitHub. Compiled August 2026.
Where Zitadel wins
The daily active user unit fits products people visit occasionally
This is the whole point of the comparison. A meter that counts logins rather than accounts is generous to any application with a long tail: a payroll portal, an insurance dashboard, a booking tool, a school system. Fifty thousand registered users of whom a few thousand log in on a given day is a small number in Zitadel's unit and a large one in a per-user unit. The inverse is also true and you should check it: an internal tool everybody opens every morning converts nearly one to one, and the advantage narrows to the headline price.
A published price where Okta's product starts at a sales call
For customer-facing logins the comparable Okta product is Customer Identity, whose base platform is $3,000 a month on the Enterprise tier with the B2C and B2B suites custom-priced. Zitadel publishes $100 a month including 25,000 daily active users. Even allowing generously for feature differences, one of those you can put in a budget today and the other requires a conversation.
Self-hosting is a real option, not a downgrade
Zitadel is AGPL-3.0, so running it yourself is the same software rather than a stripped community build, and Enterprise can be deployed in your own infrastructure with a 99.99% uptime commitment. Cloud customers pick a region: EU, US, Switzerland or Australia. That gives you an unusual escape hatch, since the answer to "what if the pricing changes" is that you can run it, which is not available on either Okta product.
Multi-tenancy and audit are in the architecture
Organisations are a first-class concept, so serving many customer tenants from one instance is the designed path rather than a pattern you invent. The system is event-sourced, which means the audit trail is a consequence of how state is stored rather than a log you hope was enabled, and that is a good conversation to have with an auditor.
Where Okta still wins
Employee single sign-on is not the same job, and Okta is better at it. The workforce half is a large catalogue of pre-built application integrations with each vendor's SAML quirks already handled, Universal Directory, and lifecycle management. Zitadel connects to standards-compliant applications perfectly well and gives you nothing for the awkward legacy ones. If your problem is 60 SaaS tools and a joiner and leaver process, that is Okta or Keycloak territory, not this page.
Lifecycle automation is a rebuild. Okta Workflows has no import path anywhere on this list, so provisioning, de-provisioning and HR-driven group membership become code against the Zitadel API. That work is entirely doable and it is not free, and de-provisioning is the half that matters for security rather than convenience.
Verify the DAU definition against your own traffic before you commit. A meter that counts daily logins is excellent for weekly-use products and unremarkable for daily-use ones, and the number that matters is your peak day, not your average. Pull real login counts from your current provider for a month, take the busiest day, and model that. A unit that looks cheap on an average is the classic way to be surprised by a bill.
And AGPL-3.0 needs one honest read. Running Zitadel as your own identity provider and calling it over OIDC from your applications is ordinary use with no licensing consequence for your code. Forking Zitadel and offering the modified version to others over a network does carry source-availability obligations. If your plan involves embedding a modified Zitadel in a product you ship, that is a question for whoever handles licensing, before the migration rather than after.
Deciding, practically
Four steps, in order:
1. Separate the two problems. Employee SSO and product logins are different purchases. Answer them separately or you will pick a tool that is wrong for half of what you need.
2. Get your real numbers. Registered users, monthly active users and peak daily active users, from your current provider's own reporting rather than from an estimate.
3. Price the same base in each unit. Okta per user with the $1,500 annual minimum, Auth0 in monthly active user bands, Zitadel in daily active users. The spread between those three for one identical user base is usually the surprise, and it is the answer.
4. Pilot on the free tier before committing. A hundred daily active users is enough to migrate one application end to end, confirm your claims and token flows, and see the admin experience with your own data in it.
Common questions
FAQ: Okta vs Zitadel
What is a daily active user in Zitadel's pricing?
It is a user who authenticated on a given day, so the meter counts logins rather than registrations. The free tier covers 100 daily active users and the Pro tier is $100 a month including 25,000, with Enterprise custom-priced. The practical consequence is that the unit rewards applications people open occasionally: a tool used once a week converts a large registered base into a small daily figure, while a product people live in all day converts it almost one to one. Model your own login frequency before comparing this to a per-user or per-monthly-active-user price, because the same user base produces very different numbers in each unit.
Can Zitadel be self-hosted, and what does AGPL-3.0 mean here?
Yes. Zitadel is AGPL-3.0 and can be run on your own infrastructure, and the vendor also offers Enterprise deployment in your environment. AGPL-3.0 is a strong copyleft licence: running it internally as your identity provider and calling it over OIDC or SAML from your applications is ordinary use and does not affect the licensing of those applications. What the licence targets is modifying Zitadel itself and offering that modified version to others over a network, which then carries an obligation to make the corresponding source available. If you plan to fork it and ship it as part of a product, have someone read the licence properly rather than relying on a summary.
Is Zitadel a replacement for Okta Workforce Identity?
Partly, and the honest split is by whose logins you mean. For the users of an application you build, Zitadel is a strong replacement for Okta Customer Identity: OIDC and SAML 2.0, multi-tenancy, an event-sourced audit trail and a published price where Okta's starts at a $3,000 monthly base. For employee single sign-on it is a weaker fit than Keycloak, because the workforce side of the job is a large pre-built application catalogue plus joiner and leaver automation, and Okta Workflows has no import path anywhere on this list.