Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) is the default workforce identity provider for companies that already run on Microsoft 365, and Okta is the usual choice for companies with a mixed stack that want a vendor-neutral identity layer. Neither is better in the abstract, and if you sell software to businesses you will meet both: your first enterprise customers will each bring whichever one they already run, and a single customer may run both after an acquisition. The practical answer for a SaaS team is therefore not to pick a side but to support SAML or OIDC single sign-on and SCIM provisioning in a way that works with either.
This article is about the workforce products: the systems a company uses to sign its employees into other tools. It is not about Okta’s customer identity product (Auth0) or Microsoft’s customer-facing offerings. For that comparison, see Auth0 vs Okta.
What is the difference between Okta and Microsoft Entra ID?
Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) is Microsoft’s cloud directory and identity service. It sits underneath Microsoft 365 and Azure, so a company that has Exchange Online or Teams already has an Entra tenant whether or not it planned to use it as its identity provider. Okta is an independent identity vendor whose product is the identity layer itself, with a large catalog of pre-built application integrations that is meant to sit in front of whatever applications a company uses.
That difference in origin shapes most of the rest:
| Area | Microsoft Entra ID | Okta Workforce Identity |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Directory behind Microsoft 365 and Azure | Standalone identity provider |
| Typical customer | Microsoft-heavy organizations | Mixed or multi-cloud organizations |
| App catalog | Entra application gallery | Okta Integration Network |
| Conditional access | Conditional Access policies (see what conditional access is) | Authentication policies and device assurance |
| Provisioning | SCIM provisioning to apps; Lifecycle Workflows with Entra ID Governance | SCIM provisioning; Lifecycle Management and Okta Workflows |
| Licensing shape | Free tier plus paid P1 and P2 plans, with Governance and Suite add-ons, often bundled with Microsoft 365 licenses | Per-user pricing, sold as bundled suites or as individual products |
| Directory | Native, with Active Directory sync | Universal Directory, usually fed from an HR system or AD |
We keep licensing at the level of model because the exact tiers and bundles change often and depend on the contract. If you need numbers for a purchasing decision, ask each vendor for a current quote.
Which one will your enterprise customers use?
There is no single answer that holds across industries, but there are tendencies. Organizations that standardized on Microsoft 365 for email and documents tend to use Entra ID for sign-in because it is already there and is included in many license bundles. Technology companies and organizations that deliberately avoid being tied to one cloud vendor tend to pick Okta. Large enterprises with long histories frequently have both, for example Entra ID for the Microsoft estate and Okta for everything else, or one on each side of a merger.
For a SaaS company, the useful conclusion is that you cannot predict which provider a given prospect has. Plan to be asked for both, and treat a customer saying “we use Entra” or “we use Okta” as a configuration on their side that your product has to accept.
What do enterprise customers need from your SaaS in either case?
The same four requests come up in most enterprise security reviews, and they are provider-neutral:
- SSO through SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect. Both Okta and Entra can act as the identity provider for either protocol. Supporting both protocols widens the set of customers you can serve without a custom project. Our comparison of SAML vs OIDC covers when each fits.
- SCIM provisioning and deprovisioning. Customers expect an employee who leaves to lose access to your product without anyone remembering to remove them by hand. Both vendors can push users and groups to an app over SCIM 2.0 (IETF, RFC 7644, “System for Cross-domain Identity Management: Protocol”, 2015). Our guides on SCIM with Okta and Keycloak and on JIT provisioning vs SCIM show the choices.
- Group and role mapping. The customer’s groups should map to roles inside your app, so access follows their directory.
- A way to find the right IdP at login. When one SaaS tenant has customers on different providers, the login page has to route each user to their own company’s provider, usually by email domain. That is called home realm discovery, and it is covered in home realm discovery with Keycloak organizations.
Where do the two behave differently for an integrator?
Most of the work is the same, but a few differences cost real time the first time you hit them:
- SCIM edge cases. Microsoft documents a list of known deviations in how Entra’s SCIM client follows the protocol, so test your endpoint against Entra specifically, not only against a generic SCIM test (Microsoft Learn, “Known issues and resolutions with SCIM 2.0 protocol compliance of the Microsoft Entra user provisioning service”). Our SCIM tester is a quick way to exercise an endpoint before a customer’s admin connects to it.
- Group claims in tokens. When a user belongs to more groups than fit in a token (about 150 in SAML and 200 in a JWT), Entra leaves the groups claim out entirely and sends an overage indicator instead, so your app has to fetch the user’s groups from Microsoft Graph. Customers can avoid this by emitting only the groups assigned to your application. By default the claim carries group object IDs (GUIDs), not names, so tell customers which form your mapping expects (Microsoft Learn, “Configure group claims and app roles in tokens”).
- Admin experience. In Entra, the customer’s admin typically configures your app from the application gallery or as a custom enterprise application, while in Okta they use an app integration. In both cases, a clear setup guide with the exact URLs, entity ID and attribute names saves a support ticket for each customer.
- Test tenants. You will want a test tenant for each provider. Both vendors offer free or developer tenants for testing, and having them lets you reproduce what a customer’s admin sees.
Our SAML decoder is useful when a customer’s SAML response does not behave as expected, and setting up Entra ID SAML in Keycloak walks through the Entra side of the configuration in detail.
What is changing at Microsoft in October 2026?
Entra ID is adding a Content Security Policy to the browser sign-in pages on login.microsoftonline.com, with rollout beginning in mid-October 2026 and completing by late October. Scripts will only load from Microsoft’s trusted domains, so browser extensions or tools that inject code into the sign-in page will stop working, though users can still sign in (Microsoft Message Center item MC1481309, mirrored by the community tracker mc.merill.net). If your product relies on a browser extension or injected script on an Entra sign-in page, check that before the rollout. Our post on the Entra Content Security Policy change covers it in more depth.
How are both vendors handling AI agents?
Identity providers are increasingly asked to represent software agents as well as people. Microsoft has introduced Entra Agent ID, and we compare it with an open-source approach in Entra Agent ID vs Keycloak; for Okta’s approach, see Okta’s agent gateway vs Keycloak. For SaaS vendors, this mostly means that a token your product receives from either provider may increasingly represent a delegated agent and not only a person.
How can a SaaS accept both Okta and Entra customers?
You have two broad options. You can build separate SAML and OIDC integrations for each provider directly into your application, which tends to grow into a collection of special cases. Or you can put one identity layer in front of your application and connect each customer’s provider to it. In that model your app speaks one protocol to one issuer, and each customer’s Okta or Entra tenant is added as an external identity provider in that layer, mapped to an organization.
Keycloak supports this directly: identity brokering lets a realm trust external SAML or OIDC providers, organizations group users and their identity providers per customer, and SCIM and attribute mappers carry provisioning and group data across. A managed service such as Skycloak runs that for you, with single sign-on built in, and our pages on B2B SaaS and B2B authentication describe the pattern. If you are weighing Okta itself against an open-source alternative for your own workforce, Keycloak vs Okta, the Skycloak vs Okta page and the Keycloak vs Entra ID comparison cover that decision.
FAQ
Can Okta and Entra ID coexist in the same company?
Yes, and it is common. A frequent arrangement is Entra ID for Microsoft 365 and Okta for other applications, or one provider per business unit after a merger. Okta can federate with Entra and the other way around, so users can be routed to the right one.
Is Entra ID replacing Okta?
Not as a rule. Many Microsoft-centric organizations consolidate on Entra ID because it comes with the licenses they already pay for, while others keep Okta for vendor neutrality. Which direction a given customer goes depends on their estate and contracts, so you should plan to support both rather than bet on a trend.
Which one is easier for a SaaS to integrate with?
Both follow the SAML 2.0, OIDC and SCIM 2.0 standards closely enough that a standards-based app can integrate with either. The extra effort tends to come from edge cases such as Entra’s SCIM behavior and group claims, so test against real tenants of both providers.
Is Okta vs Azure AD the same comparison as Okta vs Entra ID?
Yes. Microsoft renamed Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID in 2023, so older articles and searches that say “Azure AD” are about the same product.
Do I need to be in the Okta Integration Network or the Entra gallery to work with them?
No. A customer’s admin can add a custom SAML or OIDC application in either product without a listing. A listing makes setup easier for them, but it is optional.
What is the difference between Okta Workforce and Auth0?
Okta Workforce Identity is for signing employees into company tools, whereas Auth0 is Okta’s customer identity product for the people who use an application you build. They are separate products with separate plans.