Okta Workforce Identity is built to manage your own employees’ access to the apps they use, and Auth0, which Okta positions as its customer identity product, is built to run the login of the product you ship to your customers. They have had the same parent company since Okta acquired Auth0 in 2021, but they are separate products with separate consoles, tenants and contracts. If you are a B2B SaaS deciding how your app signs users in, Auth0 is the one that matches the job, and Okta Workforce Identity is the one your customers’ IT teams are likely to be using on the other end of an enterprise SSO connection.
This post compares the two for the decision a B2B SaaS team actually faces, covers how their pricing models behave as customers grow, and describes where an open-standards alternative such as managed Keycloak, offered as identity management as a service, fits. It is a comparison of models and capabilities, so check each vendor’s own pricing page for current figures rather than trusting numbers quoted in an article.
Is Auth0 owned by Okta?
Yes. Okta announced the acquisition of Auth0 in March 2021 and completed it in May 2021. The two brands have been kept distinct, and Okta’s own naming now splits its portfolio into workforce identity (the original Okta product, for employees, contractors and partners accessing business apps) and customer identity (Auth0, for the people who sign in to your application).
What is the difference between Auth0 and Okta?
The cleanest way to separate them is to ask who is logging in and whose application they are logging in to.
| Okta Workforce Identity | Auth0 (Okta Customer Identity) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who logs in | Your employees, contractors and partners | Your product’s end users and business customers |
| What they log in to | The SaaS apps and internal systems your company uses | The application you build and sell |
| Typical buyer | IT and security | Product and engineering teams |
| Scale shape | Headcount of your company | Potentially millions of external users |
| Extensibility | Workflows and lifecycle automation for joiners, movers and leavers | Actions (code that runs in the login pipeline), Forms, custom databases |
| Enterprise SSO | Okta is the identity provider your own company’s IT connects to the apps it uses; your customers’ IT teams may connect theirs to your app | Your app accepts enterprise connections from each customer’s identity provider |
This mismatch happens often: teams sometimes start with whichever Okta product they already own, which usually means workforce identity, and then find it is priced and designed around employee headcount rather than a growing population of external customers.
How do tenants and enterprise connections work for B2B SaaS?
In a B2B product, each customer company wants its own staff to sign in with its own identity provider (Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace and so on). Your login system therefore has to hold many separate connections and route each user to the right one.
Auth0 handles this with enterprise connections and an Organizations feature that groups users and connections per customer. Okta Workforce Identity does not model your customers as tenants of your product, because that is not its job. This is a reason B2B SaaS teams on Okta often end up adding Auth0 or something else for the customer-facing side, which brings us to a problem both vendors’ customers run into.
What is the problem with running both?
If your company needs workforce identity for staff and customer identity for the product, running both means two consoles, two sets of policies, two audit trails and two renewals.
The practical effects show up in security reviews. An auditor asking how access is controlled across employees and customers gets two answers, and an AI agent that needs an identity may be governed differently depending on which stack issued it. Okta has talked about unifying these, so evaluate what is generally available today rather than a roadmap.
How do the pricing models compare?
The pricing models matter more for planning than any particular figure, so this table compares how each one scales.
| Model | How it scales | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Auth0 | Per monthly active user, in tiers, with some enterprise features (such as more enterprise connections or advanced MFA) in higher tiers | A B2B customer who brings thousands of employees adds that many monthly active users, and feature gates can push you into a higher tier |
| Okta Workforce Identity | Per user per month for your own workforce, usually with a product bundle | Fine for headcount, awkward if applied to external customers |
| Skycloak (managed Keycloak) | Plan price, with additional clusters billed on top and unlimited users and no per-user or per-MAU fees | Cost grows when you add environments or regions, not when a customer adds users |
For example, suppose a B2B customer with 2,000 employees signs a contract and rolls your product out. Under a per-MAU model, those 2,000 people become billable as soon as they sign in during a month, even if the customer pays you a fixed price. Under a cluster-based model, the same event changes nothing on your identity bill.
For a fuller treatment of the two sides, see our Keycloak vs Auth0 comparison, the Keycloak vs Okta guide, and Auth0 alternatives.
Which should a B2B SaaS choose?
- You need to sign in your own staff to business apps: Okta Workforce Identity, or an equivalent such as Entra ID. This is not a decision about your product’s login.
- You are building a product and want a hosted login with minimal engineering: Auth0 is designed for this, and the trade-off is cost growth with active users and the pace at which you can use enterprise features.
- You need enterprise SSO, Organizations and SCIM on open standards without per-user growth costs: managed Keycloak is the option we offer. Keycloak supports OIDC and SAML, has an Organizations feature for per-customer tenancy, and SCIM provisioning (supported natively in upstream Keycloak since 26.8). See Okta alternatives and our comparison of identity providers for how the options sit side by side.
Skycloak is identity management as a service built on upstream Keycloak, so the realm you configure is a standard Keycloak realm. That matters for exit planning, since OIDC clients and SAML configuration can move to another Keycloak deployment, which is not true of proprietary rule and action systems.
What changes with AI agents?
Okta is adding controls for non-human identities: it made Agent SSO generally available on 24 August 2026, which models AI agents as identities in the Okta directory. The comparison point for an engineering team is where the agent’s identity lives and who can revoke it. Our post on agentic IAM and Okta Agent SSO looks at what these announcements mean for Keycloak users, and it is a better guide to the detail than a summary here.
How hard is it to migrate off Auth0 or Okta?
Most of the work is mechanical because OIDC and SAML are standards. Client configurations, redirect URIs and attribute mappings translate to a Keycloak realm. The hard part is the user data. Password hashes can only be moved when the source system lets you export them, and where it does not, the usual approach is to migrate users on their first login so the password is checked against the old system once and then stored in the new one. Our step-by-step guides cover Auth0 to Keycloak and Okta to Keycloak, and the Auth0 and Okta migration pages summarize how Skycloak helps.
Frequently asked questions
Okta vs Auth0: which is better for a SaaS product?
For a product with external users, Auth0 is the Okta product built for the job, and Okta Workforce Identity is not. Open-standards options such as managed Keycloak are worth including in the comparison.
Is Auth0 the same as Okta?
No. They are owned by the same company but are different products. Okta Workforce Identity manages employee access to apps, and Auth0 provides login and user management for applications you build for customers.
Can I use Okta and Auth0 together?
Yes, and many companies do, using Okta for staff and Auth0 for their product. The trade-off is administering and auditing two platforms.
Which one should I use for enterprise SSO in my SaaS product?
Auth0 is the Okta product aimed at that use. It lets each of your business customers connect their own identity provider to your app. Open-standards alternatives such as managed Keycloak offer the same pattern without per-user pricing.
Is Auth0 cheaper than Okta?
They are priced on different bases, so the comparison depends on what you are buying. Auth0 scales with monthly active users of your product, and Okta Workforce Identity scales with the number of employees. Compare against your own user numbers on each vendor’s current pricing page.
What is Okta Customer Identity?
Okta has used names such as Customer Identity Cloud for the customer identity (CIAM) side of its portfolio, which is delivered through Auth0. It covers login, registration, MFA and enterprise connections for apps with external users.
Can I migrate from Auth0 or Okta without resetting every password?
Sometimes. If the source system lets you export password hashes, they can be imported. Otherwise, a just-in-time migration validates each password against the old system at first login and stores it in the new one, so users do not need to reset anything.