Over the years, Auth0 has established itself as a player in the world of identity and access management. They offer an authentication and authorization platform that includes social login, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and configurable login flows. It is designed for users that seek a full-featured identity platform that requires minimal setup. When it comes to authorization, Auth0 provides built-in support through Rules and Actions. For more complex authorization that goes beyond RBAC, they offer Auth0 FGA, an add-on authorization product that requires a separate implementation.
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While Auth0 is a suitable identify management solution, it’s worth exploring alternatives that might better align with your specific needs and budget constraints. Having been a builder for over a decade, and having experience building in the authorization space, I have a shortlist of products that I’d consider strong alternatives to Auth0.
Auth0's pricing structure is complex and becomes expensive quickly as you grow. While it offers authorization support, it's not designed for complex authorization models or strict compliance requirements. This becomes even more important if you’re building a product where fine-grained permissions are central to the product’s functionality.
For Auth0, pricing starts at $35/month for 500 monthly active users and jumps to $240/month for 1,000 users on the Professional plan. These jumps in pricing can be challenging as you scale. Things get even worse if you need any of the features that are only available in higher tier plans like custom databases and advanced multi-factor auth.
For startups and growing companies, pricing alone can start to make Auth0 look less appealing.
Although it has some authorization features, at it’s core Auth0 is designed to be an authentication solution. That means if you have a complex permission model, Auth0's role-based access control may not provide the flexibility you need for global permissions or attribute-based access control.
The platform takes an opinionated approach to identity management, which works well for standard use cases but can become limiting when you need to implement custom authorization logic that goes beyond simple role checks.
Even though Auth0 has great documentation, the inherent architectural limitations of the product really harm the developer experience. To implement any complex authorization patterns, you’ll find yourself writing significant customer code or workarounds. This usually means your authorization logic ends up scattered throughout your application, making it harder to maintain and reason about.
For teams focused on iteration speed and developer velocity, the time sink of implementing and maintaining these authorization patterns in Auth0 can be painful.
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Oso is the best alternative to Auth0. It’s an authorization product that takes a different approach by providing a specialized policy-as-code platform. Since Oso is purpose-built for authorization, it has a declarative policy language that simplifies expressing complex permission logic.
Pros of Oso has over Auth0:
In summary, Oso is:
Cons of Oso:
What is Oso’s Pricing?
Oso offers diverse pricing fit for specific scales of businesses. Developer-tier starts at $0/month, where as startup-tier begins at $149/month. Their growth-tier and migration services over custom pricing based on a consultation with an expert.
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Okta is a full identity platform that competes directly with Auth0 (in fact, Okta acquired Auth0 in 2021, but they keep separate product lines). Okta has enterprise-grade identity management with strong SSO and many integrations.
Okta is grown to be more enterprise-focused than Auth0, with pricing and features for larger organizations. For smaller teams and startups, it can be overkill, especially due to its complex implementation requirements relative to other developer-focused alternatives. However, a Fortune 500 buyer would likely want to take a demo with Okta Cloud while also exploring other developer-first solutions like Oso.
Pros of Okta Identity Cloud:
Cons of Okta Identity Cloud:
What is Okta Identity Cloud’s Pricing?
Okta Identity Cloud features premium pricing compared to some competitors and complex enterprise deployments requiring specialized expertise. Some users complain that similar features are present across multiple Okta products, sometimes making it confusing to know which product to use for a specific task. Okta does have a beginner tier, however, retailing at $6/user/month.
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Keycloak is a comprehensive open-source identity and access management solution that provides enterprise-grade capabilities without licensing costs. For teams that value open-source, Keycloak is a strong candidate. Developed by Red Hat, Keycloak has strong feature parity with Auth0 (social login, MFA, customizable user flows).
The main advantage is cost: being open source, you can deploy Keycloak without license fees. But that means you having to manage your own infrastructure and security updates, requiring dedicated DevOps resources.
Pros of Keycloak:
Cons of Keycloak:
What is Keycloak’s Pricing?
For organizations building customer-facing applications, Keycloak can be economical in price. Keycloak doesn’t have per-user licensing fees, enabling organizations to scale to millions of users without escalating identity costs. Accordingly, Keycloak is popular amongst consumer applications, SaaS platforms, and other scenarios with large or unpredictable user bases.
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Supabase Auth is an open-source authentication and authorization service tightly integrated with Postgres RLS. For teams already using Supabase for database or backend services, this auth system is a streamlined alternative to Auth0 with simple integration.
While not as feature-rich as Auth0 for complex enterprise scenarios, Supabase Auth is a good option for startups and smaller teams with simple pricing based on your Supabase usage rather than per-user. For hobbyists, Supabase Auth is particularly a great option given its friendly pricing and broader ecosystem libraries. However, it lacks more complex out-of-the-box functionality required by enterprise organizations.
Pros of Supabase Auth:
Cons of Supabase Auth:
What is Supabase Auth’s Pricing?
Supabase offers a free-tier with 50,000 MAU and limited specs. Upgrading to the higher-tiers offers better specs, with the next being the pro-tier retailing from $25/month.
Note: This comparison is based on features available as of May 2025. Always check the providers' websites for the most current information.
For applications where authorization is a core part of your application, Oso has several advantages over Auth0:
With Oso, you can define all your authorization rules in one place using a declarative policy language. This makes your permissions easier to understand, audit, and maintain compared to Auth0 where authorization logic is spread across your application code.
Oso is great at implementing complex permission patterns like attribute-based access control (ABAC) and global roles that go beyond Auth0’s pure relationship-based approach. This is important for applications with complex permission requirements.
As compared to Auth0, implementing authorization with Oso requires much less custom code if you’re looking to build complex permission scenarios. This is thanks to the clean abstractions that Oso provides for authorization. The result is faster development cycles and fewer authorization related bugs than implementing the same features with Auth0.
Oso's pricing model also scales more gradually than Auth0's tiered approach. It starts at $149/month for the Startup plan with 300 MAUs. This provides more predictable costs as your user base grows, avoiding the significant jumps in Auth0's pricing tiers.
Auth0 is still a good choice for authentication, but teams building applications with complex authorization needs should consider alternatives like Oso that specialize in application authorization. By separating authentication from authorization, you can use the best tool for the job rather than compromise with a one size fits all solution.
For senior engineers evaluating auth solutions the key is to assess your specific requirements around both authentication and authorization. If your application needs permission models more complex than simple role checks a specialized authorization solution like Oso paired with your authentication system of choice may be more maintainable and cost effective than relying solely on Auth0.
Ready to see how Oso can help with your authorization needs? Start with their free Developer tier to try out the platform or talk to their engineering team to chat about your use case.
Oso focuses exclusively on authorization and has more advanced tools for complex permission models than Auth0’s more general purpose approach. With Oso’s declarative policy language you can express complex authorization rules more clearly and maintain them in a central location rather than scattering authorization logic throughout your application code like you do with Auth0.
Migration complexity depends on your current implementation, but Oso is designed to work alongside your existing auth system. This means you can keep Auth0 for authentication and adopt Oso for authorization and do an incremental migration. Oso also offers migration services that can reduce engineering overhead and ensure parity with your existing system.
Yes, Oso is built with multi-tenancy in mind and has native support for tenant isolation and per-tenant authorization rules. This makes it well suited for SaaS applications compared to Auth0 where implementing robust multi-tenancy requires significant custom development.
