Microsoft Entra ID

Microsoft's cloud identity platform for SSO, conditional access, and privileged identity management.

Our take

Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) is the dominant enterprise identity platform by user count, primarily because it's bundled with Microsoft 365 — organizations that buy M365 Business Premium or E3/E5 get Entra ID Free or P1 included. The Free tier provides basic SSO and MFA adequate for Microsoft-centric environments. Conditional Access (P1) adds risk-based authentication policies — 'require MFA when signing in from non-compliant devices or unfamiliar locations' — which is the most impactful security feature for most organizations. P2's Identity Protection and Privileged Identity Management (just-in-time admin access) are enterprise security essentials at $9/user/month. The comparison with Okta: Entra ID wins on cost (especially for existing M365 customers) and Microsoft ecosystem integration; Okta wins on non-Microsoft app catalog breadth, independent cloud posture, and multi-cloud flexibility. For organizations heavily invested in Microsoft stack, Entra ID P1/P2 is rarely worth replacing with Okta.

Product roadmap

Microsoft is consolidating its identity portfolio under the Entra brand (Entra ID, Entra Permissions Management, Entra External ID), expanding AI-powered threat detection through Security Copilot integration, and building out Verified ID (decentralized identity) capabilities. Entra External ID is the CIAM product competing with Auth0/Okta Customer Identity.