Okta → FusionAuth

Okta’s Workforce Identity line is built for employee sign-in to business apps, while its Customer Identity line covers sign-in for an organisation’s own users. FusionAuth is an authentication platform that applications connect to over OAuth 2.0, with users, applications and registrations managed in its own admin interface. The two overlap when a company uses Okta to authenticate customers, which is the case this comparison assumes.

What Okta costs

On the Workforce Identity pricing page, Starter is $6, Core Essentials $14 and Essentials $17 per user per month, with Professional and Enterprise quoted on request. Suites are billed annually, and there is a $1,500 annual contract minimum. The Customer Identity Enterprise base platform is listed at $3K per month billed annually, with an annual contract required for it and its add-ons. Because Okta prices by seat or platform fee, a business with a large customer base and few staff should check which product it is actually paying for.

What FusionAuth costs

FusionAuth’s pricing page describes Community as free, unlimited and self-hosted on your own infrastructure. Starter begins at $162 per month billed annually and adds advanced MFA and application theming, breached password detection and machine-to-machine authentication, with community support only. Essentials and Enterprise both begin at $2,970 per month billed annually. Essentials adds advanced connectivity and security features, custom OAuth scopes and email support with a 24 to 48 hour business-hours response. Enterprise adds advanced threat detection, an SSO Tenant Manager, solution architect guidance and 24/7 email and phone support. The page ties price to a monthly active user slider but does not explain the formula, and it does not say whether paid plans can be self-hosted, so ask before assuming either way.

What the switch changes

FusionAuth’s install guide uses Docker Compose with PostgreSQL and OpenSearch, so a self-hosted deployment means running those pieces. Each Okta application becomes an application record in FusionAuth, and registrations link users to it. The pricing page lists machine-to-machine entity caps of 100 on Starter and 1,000 on Essentials, which matters for service-heavy systems.

What migration involves

FusionAuth’s migration documentation offers two routes. The bulk route loads users through the Import API; its tutorial suggests batches of 1,000 if a one-by-one script is too slow. Existing hashes can be kept when FusionAuth supports the scheme, such as salted-sha256, and a custom password hashing plugin handles uncommon algorithms. The second route is a slow migration with Connectors, which check credentials against the old system at first login. FusionAuth’s Azure AD B2C guide says Connectors are a paid feature requiring at least a Starter plan.

Okta complicates the first route. Its Users API documentation shows an existing password as an empty object, and an Okta support article limits hash export to very limited cases, for active users moving from Okta to Auth0, through an account team and a support case. FusionAuth’s migration guides cover Auth0 and Azure AD B2C, and none is specific to Okta. That Auth0 guide says email and SMS second factors can be imported but authenticator-app secrets probably need re-enrolment, and the same constraint is likely here.

Migration checklist

• Confirm whether Okta is serving customers or staff, and pick the right comparison.
• Export users and attributes through the Okta API and map them to FusionAuth fields.
• Ask Okta whether any hash export is open to you; if not, import without passwords.
• Decide between password resets and a Connector-based slow migration.
• Recreate applications, redirect URLs and roles, then test sign-in in a non-production tenant.
• Keep Okta live until most active users have moved.

FusionAuth gives a cheap self-hosted entry point and a clear price ladder, but the step up to Essentials is large and the Okta path is less documented than the Auth0 one.