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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

I work with a LOT of large enterprises, and I see Okta everywhere. Where I don't see Okta, I see Microsoft and Ping. I've never run across an enterprise using Auth0, so I was surprised to see this statement:

>Auth0 is the most prominent alternative that customers consider when evaluating Okta.

Is there a feature/vertical where Auth0 and Okta compete that isn't enterprise IDMS? Or was Auth0's market outside of the Fortune 500 space?

* edit - OK, it seems clear from the responses that what I see Okta used for (employee/internal identity management) is not what Auth0 was focused on. That makes sense - thanks for all the answers!

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Okta and Auth0 have mostly been serving the opposite ends of enterprise login, with Okta starting to take on Auth0 (and not so much the other way around).

Okta mostly handles being the "enterprise database of users + gateway to your enterprise apps", i.e. it's an identity provider (IdP). ActiveDirectory and PingIdentity are competitors here.

Auth0 mostly handles the other end of the line: they help companies be "a thing you can log into using an IdP", i.e. they help companies be a service provider (SP). Custom SAML/OIDC implementations are the biggest competitors here. Okta has increasingly been competing with Auth0 in the space of SaaS SP solutions.

So it's in the latter half -- service providers -- where the two compete. You may have been looking in the wrong place. Plus, not all companies are service providers, and many companies that are service providers roll their own implementation of the relevant protocols.

Startup here who went with Auth0 for our SaaS. It seemed very developer friendly and something we could (and did) on-board ourselves. It gave us a custom, federated identity system that could brand and integrate with our backend without getting into a big enterprise sales cycle. We're a small team.

I would say that Okta was primarily IAM (identity and access management for your employees) and Auth0 was primarily CIAM (customer identity and access management).

So I think they both were aiming at the same customers, just for different use cases.

Primarily startups. We've used Auth0 for the last 4 years and we've only ever had one outage.

We were/are (Fortune 500) in the process of migrating from Ping to Auth0... Glad I’m not on the group that’s been working on that for the past 1-2 years

Interesting sentiment. What were the pain points? What was better about Ping?

Your comment is an interesting contrast against https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359752

The company I work for went with Auth0 for a new SAAS offering, partly because Auth0 kept beating Okta on price (at least for our use case).

With this acquisition, that won't be the case much longer.

A lot of enterprises pick the cheapest option. Especially if it's just one business unit making the choice.

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