Is Okta free? What it actually costs in 2026
No free tier. It is a paid product.
Priced per monthly active user, per product, with most features sold separately: single sign-on around $2/user/month, MFA around $3, lifecycle management around $4, and API access management on top. A mid-sized company assembling the pieces it actually needs typically lands between $6 and $11 per user per month, with annual minimums. Figures checked 2026-08-03; identity pricing is heavily negotiated, so treat these as a starting point.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if identity is genuinely business-critical and you want somebody contractually responsible when SSO breaks at 9am. Stay for the integration catalogue — thousands of pre-built application connections that you would otherwise configure by hand. Stay if you need the compliance envelope: FedRAMP, audit tooling and the paperwork enterprise procurement demands. And stay if you do not have a platform team, because self-hosted identity is the least forgiving thing to run badly.
What you are locked into
High, and it is the integrations rather than the users. User records and group memberships export via SCIM and the API. What does not move is the hundreds of application connections, the provisioning rules, the MFA enrolments people have on their phones, and the conditional-access policies built over years. Re-enrolling every employee in MFA is the step that makes identity migrations painful, and it is unavoidable. Plan for a parallel run, not a cutover.
If you would rather not pay: Keycloak
Keycloak
Apache-2.0 identity, backed by Red Hat, running at enterprise scale.
Free and open source. Red Hat build with commercial support available.
See all 5 Okta alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Okta before you commit. More identity & access management decisions on Macrostack.