Share This Article
With Okta® increasing their prices to upwards of $25 per user per month, many IT admins are asking what is better and cheaper than Okta? In addition to web application single sign-on (SSO) capabilities, IT admins may be looking for some system management capabilities from the cloud in order to get the most bang for their buck. Are you looking to save money and/or bolster your cloud-based IT management capabilities? Continue reading and we will ultimately answer the question, “What is better and cheaper than Okta?”
What’s Better than Okta?
Simply put, in the world of web application SSO for large enterprises, there isn’t much better than Okta. Okta has done an excellent job with its platform and company, and that’s apparent when you look at its balance sheet. Counting Adobe®, National Geographic, Nasdaq, and myriad others as its customers, it’s clear they’re doing something right. Anytime you have organizations of that size and prestige trusting a company to manage web identities, you can be assured that they’re at the top of the first generation IDaaS pile.
But, there is a new generation of identity and access management solutions emerging. This solution is working to reimagine how organizations approach the web application SSO solution and much more. The goal of this solution is to do more than simply enable access to web applications; it seeks to combine the functions of web app SSO with the traditional identity provider (IdP) to create an all-in-one solution devoid of messy implementation, configuration, and maintenance tasks. But, before we get into that specific solution, let’s talk a little bit about how things have been done historically.
Okta’s Windows® Teammate
In order to effectively use Okta, it must be used in conjunction with Microsoft® Active Directory® (MAD or AD). When combined with Active Directory, Okta extends Active Directory credentials to Okta’s vast web application SSO network. Basically, what this setup enables is one set of credentials for your Windows resources and web applications. And actually, it’s a good setup if you’ve got a Windows-only enterprise and web applicationw. But, as we know, today’s IT environments are heterogeneous and leverage non-web applications as well.
Aside from the fact that IT environments are no longer Windows-only, the price of purchasing everything required to get AD up and running can get very expensive. Active Directory calls for the purchase of a physical server or servers, CALs, hosting, backup, security, monitoring, VPNs, IT administration, multi-factor authentication (MFA), governance, identity bridges, and finally the SSO solution itself. When you factor these costs in, the $25 per user per month fee for Okta is merely the tip of the iceberg. Below we will take a look at the modern IT environment, and it will become apparent that there is a new way to approach identity management and many of these costs are not a necessity.
Today’s IT Environment
Nowadays, you have Windows machines alongside Mac® and Linux® endpoints. Infrastructure has moved from on-prem implementations to hosted services from Amazon Web Services®, Digital Ocean, and Google Compute Engine™. All sorts of new file storage solutions have flooded the market with on-prem implementations like Samba and NAS devices as well as remote file servers from Box™ and G Drive™. Obviously, these solutions fall well outside the Windows ecosystem, but they’re in our IT environments nonetheless. The end result is that IT admins are searching for a completely different approach to IT resource management than the traditional pairing of Okta and AD.
A Cheaper, Comprehensive Solution
The next generation of cloud directory services, is securely managing and connecting users to their IT resources including systems (Windows, Mac, Linux), cloud and on-prem servers (Azure®, GCE, AWS®), web and on-prem applications via LDAP (Jira®, OpenVPN™, etc.) and SAML (Salesforce®, Slack, etc.), physical and virtual file serves, and wired and WiFi networks via the RADIUS protocol. The next generation of directory services comes by way of JumpCloud® Directory-as-a-Service®. It represents the reimagination of Active Directory combined with Okta, as well as the problem of endless AD add-ons. Plus, it all comes in well under the $25 per user, per month price tag Okta charges. Check out our pricing here.
Learn More About JumpCloud
When you’re considering what is better and cheaper than Okta, you may actually be looking for a reimagination of the traditional directory services solution. If that’s the case, sign up today for a free account. A free JumpCloud account will enable you to manage up to 10 users for free, forever. Once you’ve signed up, be sure to visit our Knowledge Base to help you get your account up and running.
