WorkOS Alternatives in 2026: 8 B2B Identity Platforms Compared

Teams shop for WorkOS alternatives for three different reasons, and they lead to three different answers. If per-connection SSO pricing is the problem at high tenant counts, SSOJet bills connections at a lower list price and Frontegg includes five for free. If you bought enterprise identity too early and really needed React login, Clerk. If WorkOS was only ever your SSO layer and you now need consumer CIAM, MFA, and fine-grained authorization, Auth0 or Stytch. If the admin portal is the product you are selling, Frontegg.

One honest caveat up front: WorkOS is very hard to beat on price for the job it does. AuthKit is free to one million monthly active users. Most teams should switch for capability, not for the invoice, and this page prices the alternatives so you can tell which case you are in.

How we evaluated

Every price and plan limit below was read off the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026, not copied from another comparison post. Where a vendor does not publish a list price for the relevant product, this page says so rather than inventing a figure.

Deepak Gupta founded LoginRadius and scaled it past a billion managed identities. Four axes decide B2B identity purchases. How does cost behave as enterprise tenants multiply rather than as users multiply? Is directory sync a real product or a checkbox? Can customer IT admins self-serve? And what audit evidence can you produce?

Last verified: September 2026. Checked this pass: WorkOS, SSOJet, Clerk, Auth0, Frontegg, Stytch, Okta and Microsoft pricing pages, plus the Twilio and Okta ownership changes.

What WorkOS actually costs

WorkOS pricing as of September 2026 has two parts, and the second one is what people mean when they say WorkOS got expensive.

AuthKit is free for the first one million monthly active users, then $2,500 per month per additional million.

SSO and Directory Sync connections are priced identically on a sliding scale. It runs $125 each for one to fifteen connections, $100 for sixteen to thirty, $80 for thirty-one to fifty, and $65 for fifty-one to one hundred, with custom pricing above that.

Run the arithmetic on your own tenant count before you shop. At 20 enterprise customers each using SSO and SCIM, that is 40 connections at $80, or $3,200 per month, with the user layer free. Cost tracks logos, not users. That is the shape, and whether it suits you is the whole question.

Quick comparison

Platform	Pricing (Sept 2026)	Best for	Main trade-off
SSOJet	Free forever, unlimited users and orgs, no SSO or SCIM connections; Business from $79/mo annual covering 2 to 200+ connections; no per-user fees	B2B SSO and SCIM at a lower connection price	Smaller connector ecosystem
Clerk	Free to 50,000 MRU; Pro $25/mo; $0.02 per extra user; $75/mo per enterprise connection beyond the first	React and Next.js login with organizations	Directory Sync is thinner than WorkOS
Auth0	Free to 25,000 MAU; B2B Essentials from $150/mo, Professional from $800/mo	Full CIAM: consumer plus B2B, FGA, compliance breadth	Costs far more than WorkOS on a B2B SSO shape
Frontegg	Pay as you go from $0; free tier 7,500 MAU with 5 enterprise SSO or SCIM connections; Enterprise quoted	Embedded self-service admin portal	Published pricing is calculator-based above the free tier
Stytch	Free to 10,000 MAU and agents, unlimited orgs, 5 SSO or SCIM connections; $125 per extra connection	B2B organizations plus passkey-first consumer	Twilio-owned since Nov 2025; smaller federation catalog
Microsoft Entra ID	Free tier; Premium P1 about $6/user/mo; P2 about $9/user/mo	Microsoft-centric organisations	Workforce-shaped, priced per user not per tenant
Okta	Workforce SSO from $6/user/mo; Customer Identity enterprise base $3,000/mo	Enterprise IAM with governance and lifecycle	Enterprise pricing floor; Okta also owns Auth0
FusionAuth	Community free and unlimited; Starter from $162/mo annual; Essentials and Enterprise from $2,970/mo	Self-hosted B2B identity with data sovereignty	You own deployment, upgrades, and uptime

Why teams leave WorkOS

No consumer suite. Progressive profiling, bot defence, adaptive MFA, and consumer passwordless are not what WorkOS sells. If your product grew a B2C side, you are buying a second platform.

The login UI is not Clerk. AuthKit is competent. Front-end teams that have used Clerk's components notice the difference, and that friction is a real reason people move.

Connection economics at high tenant counts. The free million MAU is genuinely generous. The per-connection line is where the bill lives, and past a hundred enterprise tenants it needs a negotiation.

Agent identity is documentation, not a SKU. Teams building agentic products that need machine identities as a first-class billed object look elsewhere.

Pain to pick

If your problem is	Look at
Connection pricing at high tenant counts	SSOJet, Frontegg
You needed React login, not enterprise identity	Clerk
You now need consumer CIAM and authorization too	Auth0, Stytch
The self-service admin portal is the differentiator	Frontegg
Consumer passwordless and passkeys alongside B2B	Stytch
Data residency or self-hosting is mandatory	FusionAuth, SSOJet Enterprise
The organisation standardised on Microsoft	Microsoft Entra ID
Governance, lifecycle, and audit are the driver	Okta

1. SSOJet: the same job, billed per connection at a lower list price

SSOJet covers the enterprise-readiness layer directly: SAML and OIDC SSO, SCIM and JIT provisioning, a customer-facing admin portal, IP and country allowlists, and audit logs for SOC 2 and ISO evidence. Your clients' IT teams configure their own connections in that portal. It is designed to sit alongside an existing authentication stack rather than replace it, which is what makes the migration short.

Pricing (verified September 2026). The Free plan is free forever with unlimited users, MAUs, and organizations, including passkeys, social login with Google, Microsoft and Slack, magic links, and email OTP. It does not include enterprise SSO or SCIM connections. Business starts at $79 per month billed annually, or $99 monthly, and covers 2 to 200-plus connections, where each SSO connection and each SCIM connection counts as one. It adds branded login, JIT provisioning, allowlists, and audit logs. Enterprise adds unlimited connections, dedicated private cloud, data residency in eleven regions, and SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA with a BAA. There are no per-user or per-MAU fees on any plan.

How it compares to WorkOS. Both bill connections rather than users. The published entry price is lower, and the eleven-region data residency option is something WorkOS does not match on a self-serve plan. WorkOS leads on connector breadth and on the maturity of Directory Sync as a product.

Watch out. Smaller ecosystem. Verify the exact identity providers your named accounts run before you commit. Head to head: SSOJet vs WorkOS and Frontegg vs SSOJet.

2. Clerk: if you bought enterprise identity too early

A large share of WorkOS churn is teams who mirrored an enterprise checklist before they had an enterprise customer. What they needed was excellent React login with organizations. That is exactly what Clerk is.

Pricing (verified September 2026). Clerk bills Monthly Retained Users. The Hobby plan is free to 50,000 MRU per app. Pro is $25 per month ($20 annual), Business is $300 per month ($250 annual), and overage is $0.02 per user between 50,001 and 100,000, sliding to $0.012 at ten million. Pro includes one enterprise connection (SAML, OIDC, or EASIE); additional connections are $75 per month each, falling to $15 each above 500.

Where the maths flips. At low connection counts Clerk is cheaper than WorkOS per connection, $75 against $125. WorkOS pulls ahead as connections scale, because its sliding scale reaches $65 and Clerk's does not drop to $15 until 500-plus connections. At high user volume WorkOS wins outright, because AuthKit is free to a million MAU while Clerk starts charging at 50,000.

Watch out. Directory Sync is a product at WorkOS and a feature at Clerk. If a named deal requires SCIM now, do not switch. Head to head: Clerk vs WorkOS.

3. Auth0: when the product outgrew B2B-only identity

Auth0 is the answer when WorkOS was the SSO layer and you now need the rest. That means consumer CIAM alongside B2B, fine-grained authorization, a very large federation catalog, breadth of compliance attestations, and packaged agent identity.

Pricing (verified September 2026). The free tier covers 25,000 MAU. The relevant line for this comparison is B2B: Essentials from $150 per month, Professional from $800, Enterprise quoted. B2C Essentials starts at $35 and Professional at $240.

Watch out. Almost never cheaper than WorkOS on a B2B SSO shape, because AuthKit's free million MAU has no equivalent. Switch for capability. If cost is the driver, you are reading the wrong page, and the full Auth0 alternatives comparison is the better starting point. Head to head: Auth0 vs WorkOS. For the stage-by-stage framing, see Auth0 vs Okta vs Stytch vs WorkOS vs SSOJet: A Buyer-Stage Framework.

4. Frontegg: when the admin portal is the product

Frontegg is B2B SaaS identity built around an embedded self-service experience. Tenant admins manage their own users, roles, SSO configuration, API tokens, and audit logs inside your application rather than in your support queue. If your enterprise buyers judge you on that surface, this is the differentiator.

Pricing (verified September 2026). Pay as you go starts at $0 per month, with a free tier covering 7,500 monthly active users, five enterprise SSO or SCIM connections, unlimited organizations, and a fully customised hosted login. Above the free tier, pricing is calculator-based across monthly active users, enterprise connections, and machine-to-machine tokens, with Enterprise quoted by sales. Five included connections is the notable number, because at WorkOS those five cost $625 per month.

Watch out. WorkOS's free million MAU is hard to beat once user volume is high, so model both sides on your actual tenant-to-user ratio. Head to head: WorkOS vs Frontegg.

5. Stytch: B2B organizations plus consumer passkeys in one vendor

Stytch B2B covers organizations, SSO, and SCIM, and the consumer product brings passkeys, magic links, and device fingerprinting. It is the option for a mixed B2B and B2C product that started on WorkOS for SSO and then needed consumer enrolment. Twilio acquired Stytch in November 2025, which belongs in any procurement review as an ownership-risk note.

Pricing (verified September 2026). The pay-as-you-go plan includes 10,000 monthly active users and AI agents, unlimited organizations, five SSO or SCIM connections, and 1,000 machine-to-machine tokens at no cost. Extra SSO or SCIM connections are $125 each, matching WorkOS's entry rate. Fraud fingerprinting is $0.005 per fingerprint beyond 10,000 included.

Watch out. Not an admin-portal product in the way Frontegg is, and the federation catalog is smaller than WorkOS's. Demo the identity providers you actually have.

6. Microsoft Entra ID

Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, is the identity backbone for Microsoft-centric organisations: SSO to Microsoft 365 and thousands of SaaS apps, Conditional Access and risk-based policies, MFA and passwordless, lifecycle automation, and Intune integration. Free, Premium P1 at about $6 per user per month, and Premium P2 at about $9 per user per month.

Watch out. This is workforce identity, priced per user. It is what your enterprise customers run on their side of a SAML connection, not usually what a B2B SaaS buys to serve them. If you need customer-facing identity in the Microsoft cloud, the relevant product is Entra External ID, and note that its predecessor Azure AD B2C has not been sold to new customers since 1 May 2025.

7. Okta

Okta is the enterprise IAM incumbent: lifecycle management and provisioning, adaptive risk policies, Universal Directory, API access management, an integration catalog in the thousands, and the compliance evidence large buyers ask for. Published pricing is $6 per user per month for the Workforce Starter suite and $17 for Essentials, billed annually, with Customer Identity carrying a $3,000 per month enterprise base platform fee and usage-based add-ons quoted on annual MAU.

Watch out. There is a pricing floor here that a startup replacing WorkOS will feel immediately. Okta also owns Auth0, so shortlisting both is one vendor relationship, not two.

8. FusionAuth: the self-hosted option

FusionAuth is the practical answer when data residency or self-hosting is a hard requirement your enterprise customers wrote into the contract. It is a single-binary, API-first platform with multi-tenancy, per-tenant theming, SSO, MFA, and full REST API coverage, deployed on your own infrastructure or in FusionAuth Cloud.

Pricing (verified September 2026, and it has changed). Older comparisons quote "$37 per month cloud, $125 per month self-hosted". Those numbers are gone. The current pricing page lists Community as free and unlimited with the core authentication features, Starter from $162 per month billed annually, and Essentials and Enterprise from $2,970 per month billed annually.

Watch out. Self-hosting moves the cost from an invoice to an on-call rota, and the licence is not OSI-approved, which some procurement teams block.

Newer entrants worth a look

Three younger platforms target the same enterprise-readiness job and now have head-to-head profiles: Scalekit, Tesseral, and Wristband. They are worth a demo if your requirement is narrow and your tenant count is growing fast. Their list pricing for the SSO and SCIM products was not verified in this pass, so ask for it in writing before you model a switch.

Migrating off WorkOS

This migration is easier than most, because the thing you are moving is configuration rather than credentials. Each enterprise SSO connection is a set of SAML metadata, certificates, and attribute mappings that transfer to the new platform. Your customer's IT admin then updates two values on their side, the ACS URL and the entity ID, and rotates the certificate.

The cost is coordination, not code. Twenty enterprise tenants means twenty scheduled changes with twenty IT teams, each on their own change-control calendar. Run both platforms in parallel through the transition so no tenant is ever dark, and migrate your highest-touch accounts last, after the process is proven on smaller ones.

SCIM connections need the same treatment plus a reconciliation pass, because provisioning state can drift during a parallel run. Check that group and role mappings landed correctly before you cut the old connection.

See the SCIM provisioning guide, enterprise SSO: SAML vs OIDC, and how to add SSO to a B2B SaaS.

How to choose

Stay on WorkOS if SSO, SCIM, and the admin portal are still the whole job and your tenant count is modest. Move to SSOJet or Frontegg if the connection line is the bill and you want a lower entry price or included connections. Move to Clerk if you over-bought and the real requirement was React login. Move to Auth0 or Stytch if consumer identity arrived and you now need one platform for both. Move to FusionAuth if a contract requires self-hosting.

For the full scored matrix across every vendor on one set of axes, see the CIAM Compass WorkOS profile and the CIAM providers directory.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best alternative to WorkOS?

SSOJet if you want the same connection-billed SSO and SCIM job at a lower entry price with data residency options. Frontegg if the embedded self-service admin portal is what you are selling. Clerk if you over-bought enterprise identity and needed React login. Auth0 or Stytch if your product now needs consumer CIAM alongside B2B. Stay on WorkOS if enterprise readiness is still the entire job.

WorkOS vs Clerk: which is cheaper?

It depends on your ratio of users to enterprise tenants. WorkOS gives you one million MAU free and charges $125 per connection down to $65 at volume. Clerk gives you 50,000 monthly retained users free, then $0.02 per user, and charges $75 per connection beyond the first. With many users and few connections, WorkOS wins on cost by a wide margin. With few users and a handful of connections, Clerk is cheaper and ships a better login UI. Clerk's Directory Sync is weaker, so a named SCIM requirement tilts it back to WorkOS.

WorkOS vs Auth0: is Auth0 cheaper?

Almost never on a B2B SSO shape. AuthKit is free to a million monthly active users, while Auth0's free tier stops at 25,000 MAU and B2B Essentials starts at $150 per month. Auth0 wins on capability: consumer CIAM, fine-grained authorization, compliance breadth, and connector catalog. Switch for what it does, not for the invoice.

Can I migrate off WorkOS without disrupting existing SSO connections?

Yes, if you run the platforms in parallel. SAML metadata, certificates, and attribute mappings transfer to the new provider, and each enterprise customer's IT team then updates the ACS URL and entity ID on their side and rotates the certificate. The constraint is calendar time across your customers' change-control processes, not engineering effort. Migrate small tenants first and your largest accounts last.

What is the cheapest WorkOS alternative for a startup?

For the SSO and SCIM job specifically, Frontegg's free tier includes five enterprise connections at 7,500 MAU, which is the largest free connection allowance here, and Stytch includes five connections at 10,000 MAU. SSOJet's free plan covers unlimited users and organizations but no enterprise connections, with Business from $79 per month annual. For self-hosting with no licence fee at all, FusionAuth Community is free and unlimited, at the cost of running it yourself.

Does WorkOS do consumer authentication?

Partly. AuthKit handles sign-up, sign-in, sessions, and social login, and it is free to a million monthly active users. What it does not cover is the consumer CIAM layer: progressive profiling, consent management, bot and fraud defence, adaptive MFA, and passkey-first orchestration. If those are on your roadmap, you are looking at a second platform or at Auth0 or Stytch as a consolidation.