There have been instances where I have had to juggle authentication while building for teams. The moment your product scales, meaning it moves from individual users to organisations, a lot changes. Suddenly, “Sign-in with Google” doesn’t seem to be doing its trick. You need SSO, SCIM user roles, and various other methods to manage access across workspaces.
Here’s what I learned: most authentication platforms weren't built with B2B architecture in mind. They started as consumer authentication tools, gained popularity, and then retrofitted enterprise features as customers began requesting SSO and SCIM. That restructuring shows up everywhere, from how they handle multi-tenancy to the amount of configuration required to support enterprise customers.
What B2B Authentication Actually Means
Before comparing providers, I need to clarify what B2B authentication requires, because it's fundamentally different from consumer auth at its core.
In consumer apps, you're authenticating individual users. Email/password, social logins, maybe 2FA. Each user is their own entity. Authorization is straightforward; either they're logged in, or they're not.
B2B flips this model completely. Along with authenticating users, you also manage organisations as the primary identity boundary, and users exist within that organisational context. An engineer at Acme Corp needs to log in through Acme's Okta instance. Another customer uses Azure AD. A third uses Google Workspace. They all expect their existing identity provider to work seamlessly with your app.
The Organization-First Model
In B2B systems, the organisation becomes the core unit of identity. Users authenticate individually, but authorisation always flows through their organisation membership. All access control, policies, and resource visibility depend on the organisation context in which they're operating, not just their user identity.
This creates several unique requirements:
1. Multi-tenancy at every layer: A single user may belong to multiple organisations, each with different roles, permissions, and policies. Your authentication system needs to handle organisation switching, where the entire security context changes. Active SSO configuration, role assignments, and access permissions all shift based on which organisation the user is accessing.
2. Email domain routing: Login flows often use email domains to automatically route users to the correct organisation. When someone enters user@goole.com, the system should know this belongs to Google and route them through Google’s IdP. This prevents duplicate tenant creation and auto provisions the login experience.
3. Organisation-level policies: Each organisation enforces its own authentication rules. One might require SSO for all users. Another allows a different passwordless auth but mandates MFA. A third restricts login by IP range or geographic location. Your authentication system needs to consider these organisational policies rather than applying concepts globally.
4. Controlled membership: Unlike consumer apps, where anyone can sign up, B2B systems typically require organisation admins to invite members. You're managing invitation states (pending, accepted, revoked), enforcing domain restrictions, and blocking disposable email addresses.
5. Identity unification: Users might authenticate through SSO one day, use a magic link the next, and or use social login. All these authentication methods need to resolve to a single unified user identity per organisation, not create duplicate user records.
Enterprise Authentication Layer
Enterprise authentication is actually a subset of B2B authentication. It's the specific portion focused on integrating with corporate identity providers and directory services:
1. Organisation-specific SSO: In B2B, each organisation brings its own identity provider. Each org has a unique SSO configuration, SAML metadata, OIDC client IDs, redirect URLs, and IdP identifiers. Your system must determine which organisation's IdP to use based on the email domain or explicit organisation selection during login.
2. Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning: When an SSO user logs in for the first time, the system automatically creates their user record, assigns organisation membership, maps roles according to IdP attributes, and can bypass email verification for verified enterprise domains. This eliminates manual onboarding friction for large enterprise teams.
3. SCIM directory sync: Enterprise IT departments expect automated user lifecycle management. When someone joins the company, gets promoted, changes departments, or leaves, those changes should sync to your app automatically. SCIM ensures your app mirrors the enterprise directory in near real-time.
4. Self-service admin portal: Enterprises expect a delegated admin flow where their IT team can configure SSO, SCIM, domain verification, and user/role mappings without needing to coordinate with your support team for every change.
The Modern B2B Stack
Beyond enterprise SSO, modern B2B authentication includes:
1. AI and Agent Authentication: With AI agents calling APIs and MCP servers becoming standard, you need OAuth 2.1 flows with PKCE, dynamic client registration, scoped short-lived tokens, and consent management for agent actions.
2. Runtime controls and visibility: Comprehensive logging of authentication events, session management with configurable timeouts, and audit trails that satisfy enterprise compliance requirements.
3. Flexible UI customisation: Branded login pages, admin portals, user profile widgets, organisation switchers, passkey pages, and OAuth consent screens that all feel native to your application.
Most importantly, you need all of this without spending weeks onboarding each enterprise customer or building custom logic for edge cases.
How I Evaluated The Providers
I evaluated five providers for this: ScaleKit, Auth0, WorkOS, Descope, and Stytch. Each takes a different approach to solving B2B authentication, with different trade-offs.
The evaluation focused on what actually matters when shipping B2B features:
1. Setup time: How long from creating an account to having a working SSO flow with a test organisation? Can I complete this in a few hours, or will it take a few days?
2. Developer experience: SDK quality matters because you'll interact with these APIs constantly. Are they intuitive, or do they require constant documentation lookups? Do they follow patterns you're already familiar with?
3. Integration ease: How much refactoring is required? Can it be integrated into an existing app cleanly, or does it require architectural changes?
4. Multi-tenancy handling: Does the platform support an organisation-first architecture, or are you building custom logic to map their user-centric model to your organisation's structure?
5. Customer self-service: Can enterprise customers configure their own SSO and SCIM, or must I act as the middleman, coordinating with IT teams for every configuration change?
6. UI customisation depth: Not just "can I add my logo," but can I customise login pages, admin portals, user profiles, org switchers, and OAuth consent screens to match my product?
7. Pricing model: Some charge per monthly active user (MAU), others per connection, others per organisation (MAO). This has a dramatic impact on economics as you scale. I also looked at whether features are gated behind higher tiers.
8. Documentation and support: Clear, current docs that cover real-world scenarios and edge cases. Responsive support when you hit issues.
What became clear is that there's a fundamental divide in how these tools were built. Some started with consumer authentication and added B2B features later, treating organisations as an afterthought. Others were designed for B2B from the beginning, with multi-tenancy and organisation-first architecture built into the foundation.
Here's how they compare:
| Provider | Setup Time | Best For | Pricing Model | Key Strengths |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScaleKit | Under 10 minutes | B2B SaaS & AI apps | First 1M MAUs + 100 MAOs free | Full-stack B2B auth, AI-ready, org-first architecture |
| Auth0 | Days for B2B | Complex requirements across B2C/B2B | First 25K MAU free, for both B2C and B2B use cases | Comprehensive features, battle-tested |
| WorkOS | Within an hour | Enterprise B2B focus | Per connection for SSO ($125/mo each) | Mature B2B solution, polished APIs |
| Descope | ~30 min (simple flows) | Custom workflows | Varies by usage | Visual workflow builder |
| Stytch | Few hours for B2B | Passwordless-first | Per MAU | Excellent DX, strong passwordless |
ScaleKit
I’m starting with ScaleKit because it’s the only provider in the comparison list that was built from the ground up for B2B authentication.
Setup Time
ScaleKit’s Full Stack Authentication can be up and running in under 10 minutes.
The flow is straightforward. You create an environment, grab your API keys, install the SDK, and you’re authenticating users from their organisation’s SSO. The admin portal, where customers can configure their own SSO, is also included. They provide a fully-hosted admin portal that allows your customers to set up SSO with 20+ IdPs (Custom SAML, Custom OIDC included)
This is the part that surprised me most. With other providers, I was the middleman for every SSO configuration. A customer wants to add Okta? I'm exchanging emails with their IT team, copying metadata XML, and debugging SAML assertions. With ScaleKit, you can implement enterprise-grade SSO with minimal code. They also offer pre-built integrations with major identity providers, including Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, JumpCloud, and OneLogin.
Developer Experience
ScaleKit’s SDK (Node, Python, Go, Java) feels like it was specifically designed for the unique needs of B2B organization and user data models
You can find out more about the SDKs here.
Along with the SDK, what makes ScaleKit easy to integrate is that the entire model is designed around how you actually build B2B apps.
Everything is scoped to organisations. Which includes:
- Authentication
- Syncing directories
ScaleKit handles edge cases that would otherwise require custom logic, including account deduplication when users sign in through different methods, invitation-based access with state management, pre-signup and pre-session hooks for custom validation logic, domain allowlists and blocklists, conditional authentication based on IP or region, and custom metadata injection during signup and login.
Logging and visibility are comprehensive. Track authentication events, session details, failed login attempts, and agent actions in real-time. Audit logs meet enterprise compliance requirements by providing detailed trails of who accessed what, when, and from where.
Session management includes configurable idle timeouts, maximum session duration, short-lived access tokens with automatic refresh, and automatic logout after inactivity periods.
Integration Flexibility
ScaleKit integrates with existing auth providers if you're already using them. Connect with Auth0, AWS Cognito, Firebase, or Keycloak to validate user identity while using ScaleKit's B2B and AI features on top.
UI Customization
ScaleKit offers extensive UI widget customisation across the entire authentication experience:
1. Hosted login and signup pages: Fully branded and hosted by ScaleKit. Customise colours, logos, fonts, and layout without maintaining frontend code. Launch in days with zero UI work.
2. Admin portal: White-labeled by default with your branding. Customers see your product, not ScaleKit's. Customise themes, colours, and domain (CNAME support).
3. User profile widgets: Drop-in components for users to manage their profile data, view connected accounts, and update security settings. No custom forms or endpoints required.
4. Organisation management: Pre-built widgets for organisation switchers, member management, role assignments, and session policies that admins can access without leaving your application.
5. Passkeys pages: Branded interfaces for users to register and manage passkeys with WebAuthn.
6. OAuth consent screens: Customizable consent flows for agent actions and third-party integrations, showing users exactly what permissions they're granting.
7. Custom emails: Design and deploy authentication emails (magic links, OTPs, account alerts) through your own email provider, fully aligned with your brand identity.
Pricing
The free tier includes 100 monthly active organisations (MAOs), 1 Million Monthly Active Users (MAUs), 1 free SSO/SCIM connection, 10,000 M2M tokens for API authentication, 10,000 M2M tokens for MCP authentication, and passwordless authentication. No feature gating, every feature is unlocked.
Paid tiers are based on MAUs and MAOs, not connections.
Where ScaleKit Fits
ScaleKit is aimed at teams building B2B SaaS or AI applications who want a complete authentication foundation early, with organisation-first multi-tenancy, enterprise SSO and SCIM that customers self-serve, modern passwordless and social auth, AI-ready capabilities for MCP and agent workflows, deep runtime control with comprehensive logs, UI customisation across all surfaces, and pricing that stays predictable as usage grows.
If your roadmap includes modern authentication methods, AI agent integration, and rapid iteration without requiring the purchase of additional products later, ScaleKit is the cleaner long-term bet. It's built for developers who want to ship auth in days, not maintain it for months.
Auth0
Auth0 is what most people think of when it comes to authentication. They’ve been around since 2013 and offer numerous features.
They’re also a perfect example of what happens when a consumer auth platform tries to become an enterprise auth platform. Let’s see this in detail.
The Setup Experience
Getting the basic auth working in Auth0 is fast. Their quickstarts are detailed, the documentation is comprehensive, and you can have an email/password setup running in under an hour.
Adding SSO for a B2B customer? Now, this is an interesting topic of conversation.
You’re connecting to each identity provider. Each connection requires configuration and organisation setup (which incurs an additional cost). You're mapping connections to organisations and configuring login flows with their Universal Login, which means learning their entire customisation system.
Getting a clean SSO using Auth0 can be time-consuming because Auth0 has numerous features and configuration options, making it a project in itself to determine which ones are actually needed.
What Auth0 Does Well
Auth0's SDKs are vast, covering every language and framework. Their features encompass consumer authentication, B2B, B2C, AI agent authentication, and any other authentication method you can think of. The documentation also covers edge cases that most of the providers don’t even mention.
Their Universal Login has improved significantly, and for teams that require fine-grained authorisation with their FGA (Fine-Grained Authorisation) product, Auth0 offers capabilities that surpass what most B2B-focused providers offer.
The Trade-offs
The challenge associated with Auth0 is its complexity. Complexity in the sense that it supports every authentication pattern ever created, which is commendable but overwhelming.
Auth0 uses a per-MAU (Monthly Active User) pricing model.
- The free tier includes up to 25,000 MAUs but lacks many features essential for production applications.
- Paid plans start at $35/month for B2C Essentials (500 MAUs) and $150/month for B2B Essentials (500 MAUs), with Professional at $240/month for 1,000 MAUs.
- For B2B products with thousands of users from single enterprise customers, costs can escalate quickly. The Organisations feature is available on B2B plans but comes with higher base pricing.
When Does Auth0 Make Sense
Auth0 is ideal when you need every authentication method available, have a dedicated team to manage configuration, and budget isn't a primary concern. They're designed for companies where authentication is a crucial part of the product, and precise control over every aspect is required.
For most B2B products, where you just need SSO to work so you can sell to enterprises, Auth0 might be more than necessary.
WorkOS
WorkOS recognised that enterprise authentication was often an afterthought for most providers and developed a solution specifically designed for B2B SaaS.
They’re a good choice at what they do.
Setup and Developer Experience
WorkOS is faster than setting up Auth0 for B2B use cases. Their onboarding focuses on getting SSO working, and the documentation assumes that you’re already building a multi-tenant B2B app. You can have a working SSO flow within hours.
The WorkOS SDKs are cleaned and well-structured. They clearly simplified things compared to Auth0. The API is straightforward: initiate SSO, handle the callback, and get back a user profile. They handle SAML/OIDC complexity under the hood.
Their admin portal is their USP, providing out-of-the-box UI for IT admins to verify domains, configure SSO and Directory Sync connections, and a lot more
What Makes WorkOS Strong
WorkOS was built with B2B in mind from day one. Everything is scoped to organisations. The platform handles SSO, SCIM, and Directory Sync elegantly. Customer reviews consistently praise the quality of their documentation and the responsiveness of their support team.
The free tier is genuinely generous, up to 1 million MAUs for their AuthKit product.
The Pricing Challenge
Per-connection pricing: The challenge with WorkOS is its connection-based pricing model for SSO and Directory Sync. Each SSO connection costs $125/month. While transparent upfront, this becomes expensive as you add more enterprise customers.
If you have 100 enterprise customers, that's $12,500/month just for SSO connections, regardless of how many users actually log in. As one detailed review noted, "the per-connection pricing model creates long-term churn risk due to a pricing model that competitors can easily undercut."
Feature gating: Some features that feel like basic B2B requirements (advanced SCIM capabilities, certain audit log features) are gated behind higher pricing tiers.
When WorkOS Makes Sense
WorkOS is ideal when building B2B solutions with a focused enterprise customer base, where per-connection costs are justified. You want a provider that deeply understands B2B, has a solid track record, and is willing to invest in a premium solution. The main consideration is ensuring your unit economics support the per-connection pricing model at scale.
Descope
Descope takes a visual workflow builder approach. Instead of APIs and SDKs, you drag and drop authentication logic. For simple flows, this is a fast process. The problem comes with customisation. Small changes, such as a single line of code, can transform into finding the right component, configuring its properties, and integrating it into your flow.
What Descope Does Well
The visual approach shines when you need to experiment with different authentication flows quickly and efficiently. You can modify flows without needing to touch code or redeploy them.
Say you want to add step-up authentication for sensitive actions? Drag in the components, and you're done.
Descope's strength is in its flexibility for complex user journeys. Their connector ecosystem integrates with dozens of third-party services for identity verification, fraud prevention, and risk-based authentication. For products that require constant authentication updates, the visual builder streamlines changes.
They also handle both B2C and B2B well, with solid multi-tenancy support and self-service SSO configuration for tenant admins.
The Infrastructure-as-Code Challenge
The problem comes if you're a team that values infrastructure-as-code. Authentication logic lives in visual flows on their platform, not in your codebase. For teams where everything must be versioned in git and reviewable in pull requests, this creates friction.
Descope supports exporting flows as JSON and offers templates for GitHub Actions and Terraform, but you're still managing authentication in a separate system rather than alongside your application code.
When Descope Makes Sense
Descope fits when you prefer visual builders to code, need to iterate on authentication flows quickly without deployments, want both B2C and B2B covered on one platform, your security requirements require adaptive MFA with risk signals, and non-technical team members need to modify authentication flows.
For basic B2B SSO where flows don't change often, and you prefer code-based configuration, it might be more tool than you need.
Stytch
Stytch started in passwordless authentication and expanded into B2B. They excel at what they were designed for.
The Developer Experience
Stytch's documentation and SDKs are clean, and the platform feels comfortable.
Magic link authentication, OTPs, WebAuthn, and biometrics. Stytch handles all modern passwordless methods pretty well. Their embedded authentication approach keeps everything within your application domain, giving you full control over UX.
What Stytch Does Well
Stytch truly shines in passwordless authentication and developer support. Their community Slack, responsive support team, and quality documentation create an exceptional developer experience. Multiple reviews mention switching from Auth0 specifically because of Stytch's superior DX.
Their B2B offering has matured significantly. The embeddable admin portal lets enterprise customers self-serve SSO and SCIM setup. Organisation-first architecture makes multi-tenancy more natural. They support both SAML and OIDC for SSO.
Device fingerprinting, bot detection with 99.99% accuracy, and fraud prevention are built in, which is crucial for B2C applications that deal with account takeover attempts. Intelligent rate limiting and reverse engineering protection add security layers.
Recent additions include M2M (machine-to-machine) authentication for backend services and Connected Apps for cross-application integrations, as well as a shift towards AI workflows.
The Pricing
Stytch uses per-MAU pricing similar to Auth0. For B2B products with many users per organisation, costs can scale quickly. They offer a freemium model, but enterprise features may require higher tiers.
When Stytch Makes Sense
Stytch is ideal for consumer products that require modern passwordless authentication, products that integrate B2B features into existing consumer authentication setups, teams that prioritise superior developer experience and support above all else, applications where reducing signup friction is crucial to conversion, and when passwordless authentication is a core product requirement.
What I Actually Learned
After working with these providers, here's what matters:
1. Auth0 remains the most comprehensive platform. If you need to handle every authentication scenario, B2C, B2B, AI agents, complex authorisation, and have the resources to configure it properly, Auth0 delivers. Their track record and feature depth are unmatched. The trade-offs include complexity, cost at scale (per-MAU pricing), and the learning curve associated with their extensive feature set.
2. WorkOS is the most mature B2B-focused option, excluding full-stack platforms. Their developer experience is excellent, their Admin Portal is genuinely loved by customers, and they thoroughly understand enterprise requirements. The per-connection pricing model ($125/month per enterprise customer) is the main consideration; ensure your unit economics support this at scale.
3. Descope offers something unique with visual workflows. For products where authentication is a living entity that requires constant iteration by non-technical team members, or where complex conditional flows are integral to the UX, Descope's approach makes sense. The drag-and-drop builder trades code control for configuration speed.
4. Stytch offers an excellent developer experience, particularly for passwordless authentication. If you're building a consumer-first experience with some B2B customers, or if reducing friction in signup flows is critical to your conversion metrics, Stytch's approach is compelling. Their recent additions (M2M auth, Connected Apps) show movement toward AI workflows.
5. ScaleKit is purpose-built for modern B2B SaaS and AI applications. It covers the full authentication stack, from basic login to enterprise SSO to AI agent auth, with organisation-first architecture, self-service admin portal, comprehensive UI customisation, AI-ready capabilities (MCP OAuth, token vault for AI apps), and pricing based on users/orgs, not connections.
The Real Decision Criteria
Here's what actually matters when choosing:
1. Architecture fit: Does the provider understand organisation-first multi-tenancy, or are you building custom logic to map their model to yours? B2B products need organisations as the core identity boundary.
2. Time to First SSO: How quickly can you get a customer's SSO up and running? This directly impacts your sales cycle. ScaleKit and WorkOS get you there fastest. Auth0 takes longer due to configuration complexity.
3. Customer self-service: Can customers configure their own SSO and SCIM, or are you the middleman? Being able to send a customer an admin portal link instead of scheduling calls to exchange SAML metadata is transformative. ScaleKit, WorkOS, and Descope all provide this.
4. AI and agent readiness: If your roadmap includes AI features, MCP servers, or agent workflows, does the provider support OAuth 2.1, dynamic client registration, scoped tokens, and consent management? ScaleKit and Auth0 are ahead here.
5. Pricing model and scaling: Understand the unit economics.
- Per-MAU (Auth0, Stytch): Costs scale with the total number of users. It can get expensive with large enterprise customers.
- Per-connection (WorkOS): $125/month per enterprise customer's SSO. Predictable per customer, but adds up fast.
- Per-MAU + per-MAO (ScaleKit): Scales with active users and active organisations. More predictable for B2B.
- Custom/usage-based (Descope): Varies based on features and usage patterns.
6. Maintenance burden: Once set up, how often do you touch it? ScaleKit requires minimal maintenance with self-service admin. Auth0 needs regular attention as you add customers and edge cases. Descope requires ongoing flow management in its platform.
7. UI customisation depth: Not just logos, but can you customise login pages, admin portals, user profiles, org switchers, passkeys, OAuth consent, and emails? ScaleKit offers the most comprehensive customisation. Auth0 provides depth, but through their dashboard. Others are more limited.
8. Developer experience: Are the SDKs intuitive, or do they require constant documentation lookups? Stytch and ScaleKit get consistently high marks. WorkOS is clean. Auth0 is powerful but complex.
9. Feature completeness vs. focus: Do you need a platform that does everything (Auth0, Descope), or a focused solution for your specific use case (WorkOS for enterprise B2B, Stytch for passwordless, ScaleKit for either modules or full-stack B2B + AI)?
Choose based on what problem you're actually solving. If you're adding enterprise SSO to close deals and need AI readiness, you want something purpose-built like ScaleKit. If you're building an identity platform with complex requirements across B2C and B2B, Auth0's depth makes sense. If authentication requires constant iteration by non-engineers, Descope's visual approach is effective. If passwordless auth is core to your consumer product strategy, Stytch delivers.
The worst choice is picking a tool optimised for the wrong problem. A B2B product building for enterprises doesn't need to pay for comprehensive consumer features. A consumer app doesn't need per-connection enterprise pricing. An AI application needs OAuth 2.1 and agent workflows, not just traditional SSO.
Match the tool to your actual requirements and roadmap, not to what sounds impressive on paper.
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