Descope vs Okta CIS

• Descope is multi-tenant by design and can support advanced B2B enterprise requirements. Tenants can easily be created and managed from the console or Management SDK.

• Easily control session management, password settings, and permission controls at a tenant level.

• Identity structure designed for workforce rather than tenant-centric enterprise B2B CIAM.

• Multitenancy must be manually implemented via groups, increasing complexity and administrative overhead

• Tenant-specific session policies, password controls, and authentication flows are harder to maintain and scale when relying solely on logical separation.

• Adding, managing, or deleting tenants via groups or scripts involves more manual processes, scripts, or API calls.

Descope's SSO Setup Suite provides fully self-service SSO and SCIM setup portals for B2B tenant admins, including configuration, IdP selection, user and group attribute mapping, and end-to-end testing.

• No self-service SSO setup, which complicates onboarding for new customers. 

• SSO setup is either a manual process or through a complicated API-based workaround.

No-code workflows to create and customize flows such as user invites, step-up auth, user merging, and identity orchestration.

• Lots of custom coding required to create desired user journey logic. Resources needed to maintain in-house.

• Okta Workflows is largely built for workforce identity use cases and is an expensive add-on after 5 free workflows.

Self-service, embeddable, and customizable widgets for a variety of end user actions: user and role mgmt, access key mgmt, audits, and user profiles.

Does not provide embeddable widgets, forcing developers to write complicated code to create and maintain delegated administration interfaces and processes. 

• Utilize a variety of native risk signals to enforce adaptive MFA like new device checks, impossible traveler, and VPN checks.

• Easily create branching user paths based on risk scores ingested from 3rd-party fraud services like reCAPTCHA, Forter, and AbuseIPDB.

• Risk-based MFA is more complicated to implement because of the lack of built in features like bot detection.

• Setting up risk-based MFA is restrictive since conditions can’t be easily created based on native or third-party risk scores.

• Risk-based MFA is an additional expensive SKU.

• Add fine-grained and tenant-aware authorization (RBAC, ReBAC, ABAC) capabilities to your app.

• Utilize custom JWT claims to define access controls for your app.

• Assign user roles and permissions based on workflow conditions.

• Okta CIS only provides RBAC and ABAC, with no native support for relationship-based FGA.

• Okta CIS’ concept of roles is group-based (which is a workforce paradigm) and makes implementation complex in B2B CIAM scenarios.

• Integrating with OpenFGA through webhooks is time-consuming and not scalable.

• Automated or on-demand user provisioning and deprovisioning.  

• Self-service SCIM provisioning for tenant admins.

• Integrations with major IAM systems ensure synchronization of user data across systems.

• Self service SCIM provisioning with access key widget.

• SCIM is an add-on not available in the standard Enterprise package.

• No self-service SCIM setup for B2B tenant admins.