WorkOS vs Authalla
WorkOS is built for the enterprise checklist, and it is good at it. The pricing is the opposite shape to ours: users are free almost without limit, and the things enterprise customers ask for are billed one connection at a time.
Read from WorkOS’s own public pages on . Prices change; check theirs before you decide.
| What | WorkOS | Authalla |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | WorkOS, Inc., San Francisco. Venture-backed. | Authalla Oy, Finland. Owned by founders. No outside investors, no parent company. |
| Where your users’ data sits | United States — their data processing agreement names it as the hosting country. | Hetzner in Helsinki, Finland. Sign-in email goes through Brevo (France), which stores it in Belgium. |
| Free tier | The first million monthly active users. Connections are what you pay for. | 1,000 monthly active users, with every feature. |
| Enterprise SSO | $125 per connection per month in the 1–15 band, with volume discounts above it. | Included in every plan, including the free one. |
| SCIM provisioning | $125 per connection per month, priced the same way as SSO. | Included in every plan. |
| Custom domain | $99 a month. | Included in every plan. |
| This scenario: 10,000 users, 3 SSO connections, custom domain, no vendor branding | $474 a month ($125 for each of three connections plus $99 for the custom domain). | €99 a month. |
A million free users, and a bill that starts at your first enterprise customer
Authentication at WorkOS is free to a million monthly active users. Then a customer asks to sign in with their company directory, and that single connection is $125 a month. Their second is another $125. SCIM provisioning for either is $125 a month again, and serving sign-in from your own domain is $99 a month.
In the scenario we price across every vendor (10,000 users, three enterprise connections, your own domain, no vendor branding) that comes to $474 a month, against €99 for us. We are not discounting. Enterprise SSO, SCIM, custom domains and white-label are in every Authalla plan, free included, and we have never charged per connection. The whole scenario, priced from each vendor’s own page, is on our pricing page.
On staying local
WorkOS published a post in January 2026 titled “Why authentication doesn’t need to stay local”. It is a real position, honestly argued, and we think it is wrong for European companies. Their own data processing agreement names the United States as the hosting country, and a US company answers to US courts wherever the data is stored.
Authalla has no US parent, no US investors and no US entity, and your users’ identity data is stored on EU-owned servers in Finland. If a customer’s security questionnaire asks where identity data lives and who can compel it, the answer is one page long: our European page, with the subprocessor list behind it.
No passwords at all
Passkeys are how people sign in to an Authalla tenant, with magic links and email codes as the designed fallback. There is no password option in the product, and no password code sitting behind a setting. The reasoning is in why we never built passwords.
Set up by your agent, backed by the founders
Connect our MCP server and your coding agent configures the tenant, clients, domains and branding while you describe what you want. There is no API key to paste into a .env file, because the agent signs in through the browser with OAuth. When you need help, the people who wrote it answer. Our phone numbers are on this site.