ZITADEL vs Authalla
This is the comparison where the usual European argument does not apply, so we will not pretend it does. ZITADEL offers EU data residency on every tier, including the free one. What is left is ownership, how your bill is counted, and whether passwords exist in the product at all.
Read from ZITADEL’s own public pages on . Prices change; check theirs before you decide.
| What | ZITADEL | Authalla |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | Their own GDPR page: operated by ZITADEL Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, with CAOS AG in St. Gallen, Switzerland as the operating subsidiary. | Authalla Oy, Finland. Owned by founders. No outside investors, no parent company. |
| Where your users’ data sits | Your choice of the EU, US, Switzerland or Australia, on every tier including the free one. | Hetzner in Helsinki, Finland. Sign-in email goes through Brevo (France), which stores it in Belgium. |
| How the bill is counted | Daily active users summed over the month. Pro is $100 a month for 25,000 of them; the overage rate is not published. | Monthly active users. €0 to 1,000, €99 to 10,000, €199 to 20,000. |
| Passwords | A full identity platform, passwords included. | None. There is no password option in the product, and no code that could create one. |
| Self-hosting | Open source, and you can run it yourself. | Not offered. We run it for you. |
| This scenario: 10,000 users, 3 SSO connections, custom domain, no vendor branding | Around $100 a month ($100 for Pro, covering 25,000 daily active users summed over the month — a different metric, so the two are not strictly comparable). | €99 a month. |
EU hosting is not the same as EU ownership
You can choose to have your ZITADEL data in the EU. That is real, and it is more than most of the vendors on this list offer. But it settles where the data is stored, not who controls the company holding it.
ZITADEL’s own GDPR page says the service is operated by ZITADEL Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, with CAOS AG in St. Gallen as the operating subsidiary. A US parent can be ordered by a US court to produce data its group controls, and the region setting does not change who receives that order. Authalla has no US parent, no US investors and no US entity. What each of those three phrases buys you is on our European page.
A metric you cannot forecast
ZITADEL bills daily active users summed over the month. Pro includes 25,000 of those for $100 a month, and the rate for going over is not published. That makes your bill a function of how often people come back, not how many of them there are, and it makes next year’s bill hard to model before you have a year of data.
We charge by monthly active users, the ordinary meaning, on three published tiers with every feature in each one. At 10,000 users the two land in the same place, roughly $100 against €99, but you can work ours out from the page.
No passwords, and no self-hosting
ZITADEL is open source and you can run it yourself. We do not offer that, and if running your own identity infrastructure is the requirement, they are the better fit of the two.
What we offer instead is a product with no password code in it at all. Passkeys by default, magic links and email codes as the designed fallback, in every plan. The reasoning is in why we never built passwords, and the whole price scenario across seven vendors is on our pricing page.