What's the difference between workforce IAM and customer identity (CIAM)?

Workforce IAM (Okta's core product) manages your own employees' access to internal systems; CIAM (Auth0's core product) manages how your end customers authenticate into the product you sell them. Some platforms, like Okta, cover both.

Are compliance-automation tools like Vanta and Drata the same category as Okta or Auth0?

They're adjacent, not identical — Vanta and Drata automate evidence-gathering for compliance frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, while Okta and Auth0 are the identity infrastructure that compliance frameworks often require you to have in place. Many teams buy one of each.

Choosing an identity and access management platform

Workforce identity, customer identity, and security/compliance automation all get lumped into one shopping category — knowing which job you're actually hiring for narrows six very different vendors fast.

“Identity and access” is really shorthand for at least three different purchases: managing your own employees’ access (workforce IAM), managing how your customers log into your product (CIAM), and automating the compliance evidence that regulators or enterprise customers demand (GRC). This category groups Auth0, Okta, CrowdStrike, 1Password Business, Vanta, and Drata together, but they don’t all answer the same question — worth sorting out before comparing price or features.

Customer identity vs. workforce identity vs. everything else

Auth0, now owned by Okta, is built around CIAM — authenticating your product’s end users — and carries the highest agent-readiness score in this set at 82, alongside a free tier covering up to 25,000 monthly active users. Okta itself covers both workforce and customer identity (SSO, MFA, lifecycle management) but sits lower on agent-readiness at 58 and has no free tier. CrowdStrike, 1Password Business, Vanta, and Drata solve adjacent but distinct problems — endpoint/cloud security, secrets management, and compliance automation, respectively — so don’t assume they’re interchangeable with the two identity platforms.

Every vendor here ships an MCP server

Unusually for any category, all six vendors — Auth0, CrowdStrike, 1Password Business, Vanta, Okta, and Drata — currently publish an MCP server, several with an explicit agent-facing use case: Auth0 pairs its MCP server with a dedicated Claude Code skill, Okta’s is built for admin automation, and Vanta’s beta MCP server lets an agent remediate failing compliance controls directly rather than just reporting on them. If machine or agent identity is part of what you’re evaluating, this category is more agent-ready across the board than most others on Crail.

Buying process and pricing spread

Auth0, CrowdStrike, and 1Password Business don’t require a sales call and publish starting prices ($35/month, $7.99/month, and $24.95/month respectively). Vanta, Okta, and Drata are sales-call-only — Vanta and Drata don’t publish a starting price at all, while Okta discloses $6/month as an entry point despite the sales-call requirement. Compliance certification depth also varies widely, from CrowdStrike’s long FedRAMP High/TISAX-inclusive list down to lighter-weight stacks elsewhere — check the specific vendor page rather than assuming parity.

Where to start

Browse the full Identity, Access & Security Compliance category page sorted by agent-readiness, and Auth0 vs. CrowdStrike is a useful head-to-head if you’re weighing a CIAM platform against an endpoint/identity security suite.