Why Your Business Needs Single Sign-On (And How Authentik Makes It Affordable)

Your employees are drowning in passwords. The average worker manages credentials for 70-80 different applications—and that number keeps growing. The result? Sticky notes with passwords, repeated credentials across services, and IT tickets for forgotten logins that never seem to stop.

This isn't just an annoyance. It's a security risk that costs businesses real money.

What Is Single Sign-On (And Why Should You Care)?

Single Sign-On (SSO) lets your team log in once and access all their work applications without entering credentials again. Think of it as a master key for your digital workplace.

Instead of remembering separate passwords for email, project management, HR systems, and a dozen other tools, employees authenticate once through a central identity provider. That provider then handles access to everything else.

The benefits are immediate:

For your team: No more password fatigue. One secure login, and they're in. Productivity goes up because people stop wasting time on password resets and login screens.

For IT: Centralized control over who can access what. When someone leaves the company, you disable one account instead of hunting through 50 different services.

For security: Stronger authentication becomes practical. When users only need to remember one password, you can require it to be genuinely strong—or better yet, use multi-factor authentication across everything.

The Enterprise SSO Problem

Here's where it gets frustrating for growing businesses. Enterprise SSO solutions like Okta and Auth0 are excellent products. They're also priced for enterprises.

Okta's Workforce Identity starts at $6 per user per month for basic features. Need adaptive security? That's $5 more per user. Lifecycle management for onboarding and offboarding? Another $4. Suddenly you're looking at $15-17 per user monthly—and that's before advanced features.

For a 50-person company, basic Okta runs around $3,600-10,200 per year. Auth0's B2B plans start at $150/month and scale to $800/month for professional features. Plus, most enterprise contracts require minimum commitments of $1,500 or more.

That pricing model makes sense for large corporations. For a 30-person marketing agency or a 100-person manufacturing company? It's hard to justify.

The Self-Hosted Alternative: Authentik

Authentik is an open-source identity provider that delivers enterprise-grade SSO without the enterprise price tag.

It handles everything you'd expect from a commercial solution:

• Single Sign-On for all your applications (SAML, OAuth2, LDAP)
• Multi-factor authentication with TOTP, WebAuthn, and hardware keys
• User management with groups, roles, and permissions
• Social login integration (Google, GitHub, Microsoft)
• Self-service password reset and account recovery
• Audit logging for compliance requirements

The difference? No per-user fees. Your 50-person team costs the same as your 500-person team—just the infrastructure to run it.

The Real Cost Comparison

Let's look at actual numbers for a 50-person company:

That's not creative accounting. Authentik is open-source—no license fees. You pay only for the server that runs it.

On Elestio, a managed Authentik instance runs on a 4 CPU / 8 GB RAM server for around $29/month. That includes automated backups, SSL certificates, updates, and monitoring. Whether you have 20 users or 2,000, the price stays the same.

Annual savings: $9,000-10,000 compared to enterprise alternatives.

Who Should Consider Authentik?

Authentik makes the most sense for:

Growing SMBs that need real security but can't justify enterprise pricing. You're past the point where shared Google accounts work, but not ready to spend $10K/year on identity management.

Agencies and consultancies managing client access alongside internal teams. Per-user pricing gets expensive fast when contractors and clients need limited access.

Regulated industries where you need audit trails and compliance documentation but also need to control where your authentication data lives.

Companies already self-hosting other infrastructure. If you're running Nextcloud, GitLab, or other self-hosted tools, Authentik integrates naturally and gives you unified identity management.

What About Complexity?

This is the honest trade-off: Authentik requires some setup. You're not clicking a button and having SSO magically work.

But here's the thing—neither does Okta. Enterprise SSO implementations typically involve consultants, integration projects, and weeks of configuration. The complexity is just hidden behind a sales process.

With a managed service like Elestio, the infrastructure complexity disappears. You get a working Authentik instance in minutes. The remaining work is the same you'd do with any SSO provider: configuring your applications to use it.

For most common tools (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, popular SaaS apps), Authentik has built-in integrations and documentation. The learning curve is real, but it's measured in hours, not months.

Getting Started

If you're ready to explore, the fastest path is a managed Authentik deployment on Elestio. You'll have a running instance with SSL and backups configured in under 10 minutes.

Start with your most painful authentication problem—usually the handful of apps your team uses daily. Get those behind SSO first. Then expand as you see the benefits.

The Bottom Line

Enterprise SSO is no longer optional for security-conscious businesses. But enterprise pricing doesn't have to come with it.

Authentik proves you can have proper identity management—SSO, MFA, audit logs, the works—without budgeting five figures annually. For most growing companies, that's the difference between implementing real security and hoping nothing bad happens.

Thanks for reading.