Choosing how to handle user authentication and identity management is a foundational decision for a B2B SaaS company, with implications for onboarding, enterprise sales readiness, and long-term flexibility. While both Tesseral and WorkOS AuthKit help teams implement enterprise SSO and SCIM, they serve very different roles in your stack.

WorkOS AuthKit provides SSO, SCIM, and directory sync as add-on infrastructure, designed to layer on top of an existing user management system. Tesseral, by contrast, is a complete user management platform for B2B SaaS, including core auth, orgs, roles, and SSO/SCIM out of the box.

This guide explores what makes Tesseral and WorkOS distinct and helps you decide which one fits your product and team best.

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What is Tesseral?

Tesseral is an open source, developer-first user management platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. It includes everything teams need to build authentication, authorization, organization management, and enterprise-ready features in a few lines of code.

Key Features:

• SAML and OIDC SSO
• SCIM provisioning and org-level policies
• User invites, RBAC, impersonation, audit logs
• Scoped API keys your customers can generate and revoke
• Self-service SSO configuration for your customers
• Console UI for managing organizations, users, and roles
• 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

Tesseral is designed to reduce the surface area of authentication work, especially for B2B apps built around organizations and workspaces.

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What is WorkOS AuthKit?

WorkOS AuthKit is a basic set of user management features used in simple B2C apps and B2B software alike. AuthKit offers a hosted UI that offers basic features like a login box and email verification, in addition to social login, magic links, MFA, and RBAC. Many auth features that B2B organizations need, like SAML SSO, directory sync, and audit logs, are not included in AuthKit. Instead, WorkOS offers these as fragmented bolt-on features.

For a B2B SaaS company, that means that your costs and engineering work could sharply increase as your customer base grows.

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Choosing what's right for you

For B2B SaaS, Tesseral is a better option. Tesseral’s platform is opinionated by design and gives you everything you need in one place, instead of fragmented, separately-billed features that your engineering team will need to stitch together.

Category	Tesseral	WorkOS AuthKit
Use Case	Full stack B2B user infrastructure	Basic login features for B2C or B2B use
Enterprise SSO (SAML / OIDC)	Included out of the box	Not included
SCIM Provisioning	Included	Not included
Audit Logs	Included	Not included
API Key Support	Built in, scoped, revocable	Not included
Fully Open Source	Yes	No

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Get started with Tesseral here.

Questions? Speak with a founder.