Choosing the right user management infrastructure is one of the most important decisions a B2B SaaS company will make. It affects customer onboarding, your product’s security, and your ability to sell into the enterprise.

Auth0, now owned by Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA), has long been a go-to solution in the authentication space. It’s a broadly capable platform with a strong breadth of enterprise features to support B2C and B2B customers alike. For B2B SaaS, Auth0 often requires stitching together multiple features, configuring workarounds, and writing a lot of custom logic to handle things like orgs, roles, and API auth.

Tesseral was designed from day one for B2B SaaS. If you're building a software product that services other companies, with organizations, workspaces, user roles, enterprise SSO, and scoped API keys, Tesseral gives you everything you need out of the box. It’s developer-first, open source, and gives you full control over how you deploy and manage it.

In this post, we’ll explore what makes each platform distinct and help you decide which one is right for your business.

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What is Tesseral?

Tesseral is an open source, developer-first user management platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. It helps software companies implement authentication, authorization, organization management, and enterprise-ready features like SAML SSO, SCIM, RBAC, user impersonation, and API keys, all in a few lines of code.

Key Features:

• SAML and OIDC SSO
• User invites, RBAC, user impersonation, and audit logs
• Scoped API keys that your customers can generate
• SCIM provisioning and org-level policies
• Self-service SSO configuration for your customers
• Clear console UI that shows you exactly what to do and when
• Multiple deployment options

Tesseral is also opinionated by design. Instead of offering a dozen ways to solve the same problem, it gives you the one that works for B2B SaaS, quickly and clearly. With Tesseral, you never have to write auth code again.

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What is Auth0

Auth0 is a mature, hosted identity platform that supports a wide range of use cases: B2C and B2B apps, mobile apps, marketplaces, and more. It offers flexible login options, social integrations, security rules, and enterprise features like SSO and SCIM (on a higher tier). Auth0 is powerful and flexible, especially if your product serves a variety of user types and you’re willing to write some code to handle B2B-specific features like orgs, roles, and customer-specific auth flows.

What About Auth0’s ‘Private Cloud’ Deployment?

Interested in self-hosting? You may have seen that Auth0 offers what they refer to as a “private cloud” deployment on Microsoft Azure and AWS. This is not a self-hosted deployment.

Here’s what it actually means:

• It’s still hosted and managed by Auth0, you can’t run it yourself
• It’s available only to enterprise customers, behind a ‘talk to sales’ process
• It includes rate limits and requires manual provisioning
• It does not give you access to the code, control over updates, or freedom to customize behavior

In contrast, Tesseral is open source and offers true deployment flexibility:

• Self-hosted: run Tesseral in your own cloud (for compliance, control, privacy, etc.)
• Bring-your-own-cloud: run Tesseral in your cloud, with setup and maintenance handled by our team
• Dedicated: use a private instance of Tesseral running on our cloud
• Managed: use Tesseral like a typical multi-tenant SaaS and get started in minutes

This is an important distinction for B2B SaaS companies who care about data control, compliance, and long-term flexibility, especially when serving enterprise customers.

Choosing what's right for you

Both Auth0 and Tesseral are excellent options, but your context and priorities should guide your choice in picking the right platform.

Decision Point	Tesseral	Auth0
Built for B2B SaaS	Yes	No, built for general purpose (B2C, B2B, mobile, social login, etc.); can also be used as an identity provider.
SSO Support	Included out of the box	Available on enterprise plans only, usually requires additional configuration
SCIM Support	Included out of the box	Available on enterprise plans only, usually requires additional configuration
API Key Management	Scoped, revocable, and built in	Not natively supported
Deployment Options	Hosted, self-hosted, and dedicated options available	No self hosting; “private cloud” requires enterprise plan
Open Source	Yes	No

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Get started with Tesseral here.

Questions? Speak with a founder.