Okta is the leading independent identity and access management (IAM) platform, serving over 19,000 organizations including more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, Okta provides single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, lifecycle management, and access governance for both workforce applications and customer-facing applications through its Auth0 product line.
The core workforce product is the Workforce Identity Cloud, sold in per-user per-month suites billed annually. The Starter Suite at $6/user/month provides SSO and basic MFA. The Essentials Suite at $17/user/month is the tier most compliance-aware mid-market organizations actually need — it adds adaptive MFA, lifecycle management (automated provisioning and deprovisioning), and 100 workflow automations. Professional and Enterprise suites with AI-powered threat protection, device access, privileged identity management, and API security are sold through custom pricing.
Okta’s Customer Identity Cloud (originally Auth0) covers developer-built customer authentication, priced on monthly active users with a free tier for developers and an enterprise base starting at $3,000/month.
One well-documented phenomenon with Okta is the SSO tax: many SaaS vendors charge a premium to connect a third-party identity provider, which can multiply an organization’s effective Okta cost by several times the list price when totaled across the entire software stack. A 100-person company may pay $20,400/year for Okta itself but face an additional $100,000–$200,000 in forced SaaS plan upgrades to enable SSO across all their tools.
Okta experienced a 2023 support system breach that exposed data for 134 customer companies. The company has invested significantly in security hardening since. A $1,500 annual contract minimum applies to all Workforce Identity plans.