Why does this exist?
Single sign-on (SSO) is a mechanism for outsourcing the authentication for your website (or other product) to a third party identity provider, such as Google, Azure AD, Okta, PingFederate, etc.
In this context, SSO refers to a SaaS or similar vendor allowing a business client to manage user accounts via the client’s own identity provider, without having to rely on the vendor to provide strong authentication with audit logs, and with the ability to create and delete user accounts centrally, for all users, across all software in use by that client.
For organizations with more than a handful of employees, this feature is critical for IT and Security teams to be able to effectively manage user accounts across dozens or hundreds of vendors, many of which don’t support features like TOTP 2FA or U2F. In the event that an employee leaves the company, it allows the IT team to immediately disable their access to all applications, rather than logging into 100 different user management portals.
In short: SSO is a core security requirement for any company with more than five employees.
SaaS vendors appear not to have received this message, however. SSO is often only available as part of “Enterprise” pricing, which assumes either a huge number of users (minimum seat count) or is force-bundled with other “Enterprise” features which may have no value to the company using the software.
If companies claim to “take your security seriously”, then SSO should be available as a feature that is either:
- part of the core product, or
- an optional paid extra for a reasonable delta, or
- attached to a price tier, but with a reasonably small gap between the non-SSO tier and SSO tiers.
Many vendors charge 2x, 3x, or 4x the base product pricing for access to SSO, which disincentivizes its use and encourages poor security practices.
The List
| Vendor | Base Pricing | SSO Pricing | % Increase | Source | Date Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airtable | $10 per u/m | $60 per u/m | 500% | 🔗 Quote | 2019-10-19 |
| Asana | $25 per u/m | $60 per u/m1 | 140% | 🔗 Quote | 2020-12-09 |
| Atlassian (Jira Cloud) | $7 per u/m | $10 per u/m2 | 42% | 🔗 | 2018-10-22 |
| Bitrise | $90 | $270 | 200% | 🔗 | 2019-06-25 |
| Box | $5 per u/m | $15 per u/m | 200% | 🔗 | 2018-10-17 |
| Checkly | $29 per month | $199 per month | 586% | 🔗 | 2019-07-30 |
| Clockify | $4.99 per u/m | $14.99 per u/m | 300% | 🔗 | 2021-07-31 |
| ClickUp | $9 per u/m | $19 per u/m | 211% | 🔗 | 2023-07-07 |
| CloudFlare | $20 | Call us! | ??? | 🔗 | 2021-08-11 |
| CloudSploit | $36 pcm | $99 pcm | 175% | 🔗 | 2018-10-20 |
| Copper CRM | $49 per u/m | $119 per u/m | 143% | 🔗 | 2019-07-31 |
| CoderPad | $250 per month | $1500 per month | 500% | 🔗 | 2019-06-28 |
| dbt Cloud | $100 per u/m | $333 per u/m | 233% | Quote | 2023-04-11 |
| Directus Cloud | $99 per project/mo | Call Us! | ??? | 🔗 | 2023-06-10 |
| DNS Made Easy (Digicert) | $56 per month | $175 per month3 | 212% | 🔗 Website | 2023-04-29 |
| Docker | $7 per u/m | $21 per u/m | 300% | 🔗 Quote | 2021-09-03 |
| DocuSign | $25 per u/m | $50 per u/m | 100% | 🔗 Quote | 2018-10-17 |
| Dropbox | $15 per u/m | $25 per u/m | 67% | 🔗 | 2018-10-17 |
| Elastic | $0.29924 | $0.3429 | 15% | 🔗 | 2021-02-12 |
| Envoy | $99 per location/m | $299 per location/m | 202% | 🔗 | 2020-02-17 |
| Expensify | $5 per u/m | $9 per u/m | 80% | 🔗 | 2018-10-17 |
| Figma | $12 per u/m | $45 per u/m | 275% | 🔗 | 2019-10-19 |
| GitHub | $4 per u/m | $21 per u/m | 425% | 🔗 | 2020-04-14 |
| Grammarly | $12.50 per u/m | $583.33 per u/m [^grammarly] | 4567% | 🔗 | 2022-04-12 |
| Hakuna | 69 CHF for 5 u/m | 139 CHF for 5 u/m | 200% | 🔗 | 2023-10-04 |
| Hubspot Marketing | $46 per month | $2944 per month | 6300% | 🔗 | 2018-11-23 |
| Intercom | $136 | $202 | 49% | 🔗 & 🔗 | 2018-10-20 |
| IT Glue | $19 per u/m | $39 per u/m | 105% | 🔗 | 2019-10-29 |
| LaunchDarkly | $65 per u/m | $125 per u/m | 92% | 🔗 Quote | 2020-01-24 |
| Lucidchart | $9 per u/m | $16.58 per u/m (annually) | 236% | 🔗 Quote | 2021-07-25 |
| Mattermost | $3.25 per u/m | $8.50 per u/m | 162% | 🔗 | 2019-06-25 |
| Metaplane | $825/month | Call Us! | ??? | 🔗 | 2023-05-09 |
| Miro | $8 per u/m | $16 per u/m | 100% | 🔗 | 2019-09-13 |
| Monday.com | $11 per u/m | Call us! | ??? | 🔗 | 2021-07-21 |
| NationBuilder | $29 per month | Call Us! (over $199/month) | 586%++5 | 🔗 | 2019-02-09 |
| Netlify | $9 per u/m | Call Us! | ??? | 🔗 | 2018-10-20 |
| New Relic Infrastructure | $0.60 - $7.20 per host-month6 | $1.20 - $14.40 per host-month | 100% | 🔗 | 2018-10-18 |
| Notion | $8 per u/m | $15 per u/m | 87.5% | 🔗 | 2023-09-25 |
| Nocodb | $19 fixed for 10 users (Free in technical preview) | Call Us! (Free in technical preview) 7 | ?% | 🔗 | 2023-11-15 |
| OpsGenie | $9 per u/m | $19 per u/m | 111% | 🔗 | 2018-11-08 |
| PagerTree | $10 per u/m | $15 per u/m | 50% | 🔗 | 2018-11-08 |
| PandaDoc | $19 per u/m | Call Us | ??? | 🔗 | 2023-04-24 |
| Pipedeam | $29 per u/m | $749 per u/m | 2583% | 🔗 | 2023-03-01 |
| Playvox | $15 per u/m | $30 per u/m | 100% | 🔗 | 2020-06-09 |
| Pleasant Password Server | $81.20 per user | $151 per user | 86%8 | 🔗 | 2021-09-05 |
| Postman | $12 per u/m | $24 per u/m | 100% | 🔗 | 2020-02-19 |
| Quip | $10 per u/m | $25 per u/m | 150% | 🔗 | 2019-02-15 |
| Quoter | $99/mo | $299/mo9 | 200% | 2021-08-27 | |
| Raygun | $79/mo10 | $649/mo | 721% | 🔗 | 2019-10-10 |
| RingCentral | $25 per u/m | $35 per u/m | 40% | 🔗 | 2018-10-17 |
| Rocket.Chat Cloud | $2 per u/m | $4 per u/m | 100% | 🔗 | 2018-10-22 |
| Sentry | $26 for 100K events | $80 for 100K events | 208% | 🔗 | 2018-10-20 |
| Sensu | $0 | $3 per node/month | 🔗 | 2023-11-27 | |
| Slack | $6.67 per u/m | $12.50 per u/m | 87% | 🔗 | 2018-10-17 |
| SmartDraw | $8.25 per u/m | $49.92 per u/m | 505% | 🔗 | 2023-05-10 |
| SmartSheet | $25 per u/m | Call us! | ??? | 🔗 | 2018-10-22 |
| Snyk | $23.96 per u/m | $39.98 per u/m | 67% | 🔗 | 2018-10-22 |
| Splashtop SOS | $200 per tech/year | $750 per tech/year | 275% | 🔗 | 2022-04-12 |
| Stack Overflow | $5 per u/m | $11 per u/m | 120% | 🔗 | 2019-06-24 |
| Tettra | $8.33 per u/m | $16.66 per u/m | 100% | 🔗 | 2022-04-12 |
| Trello | $10 per u/m | $21 per u/m | 110% | 🔗 | 2018-10-17 |
| TeamViewer | €27.90 per month | €833.00 per month | 2885% [^teamviewer] | 🔗 | 2022-04-12 |
| Twilio | $0 | See Notes11 | 30% | 🔗 | 2018-10-22 |
| Vercel | $20 per u/m | $150 per month on Pro plan | 250% 12 | 🔗 | 2022-08-23 |
| Veremark | pay as you go | £100 per month | ∞ % 13 | 🔗 | 2022-04-12 |
| VictorOps | $29 per u/m | $49 per u/m14 | 69% | 🔗 | 2018-10-17 |
| Zapier | $299 per u/m | $600 per u/m | 100% | 🔗 | 2019-10-19 |
FAQs
This doesn’t scale linearly for number of seats!
Correct. Since we don’t know who’s reading the page, it’s easiest to just assume a team with no volume discount.
How is base pricing determined?
We disregard free tier pricing, as we can assume these aren’t intended for long term business customer use. We also disregard “single person” pricing, under the assumption that we’re looking on behalf of a team of 5, 10, or more people.
What does “Call Us!” mean?
Many vendors do not list pricing for Enterprise-tier pricing. To avoid needing to call all of them to get this data, “Call Us!” may be listed as a placeholder. If you have numbers, please share them.
What does “Quote” mean in the Source column?
If a vendor doesn’t list pricing but a user has submitted pricing based on a quote, it can be included here. If a vendor feels that their actual pricing is inaccurately reflected by this quote, feel free to let me know and I’ll update the page.
I’m a vendor and this data is wrong!
Please feel free to submit a PR to this page, or reach out at sso @ myGitHubUsername dotcom. I only want this data to be accurate.
I’m a vendor and this doesn’t reflect the value-add of our Enterprise tier!
That’s the point. Decouple your security features from your value-added services. They should be priced separately.
But it costs money to provide SAML support, so we can’t offer it for free!
While I’d like people to really consider it a bare minimum feature for business SaaS, I’m OK with it costing a little extra to cover maintenance costs. If your SSO support is a 10% price hike, you’re not on this list. But these percentage increases are not maintenance costs, they’re revenue generation because you know your customers have no good options.
Footnotes
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Based on business vs. enterprise tier quote; premium is the lower paid tier and would reflect a larger tax. ↩
-
Hard to compare since Access seems to cover all Atlassian products, so should get cheaper per seat as more products are used - but that doesn’t help people only using Jira. (Jira was chosen as probably the most common Atlassian product.) ↩
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Requires $250 setup fee: https://support.dnsmadeeasy.com/support/solutions/articles/47001169433-saml-security-assertion-markup-language-integration ↩
-
Pricing based on a random small deployment using their pricing calculator. ↩
-
To upgrade one plan level is represented by this price increase, but to get single sign-on, you actually have to go up another plan, which is ‘Call Us’ pricing. ↩
-
Pricing varies by host size. The SSO cost increase does not. ↩
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Community PR to enable OIDC in community edition rejected https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/pull/3979#issuecomment-1378038492 ↩
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The tax ranges from 86% at this low end user count to around 54% for higher user counts. ↩
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From their support: SSO can also be added to the basic plans, for an additional annual commitment of $49/mo, which is a 50% increase over the basic plan. ↩
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From their SSO tooltip: ‘Basic SSO covers social SSO providers only (e.g. Facebook), Advanced SSO includes SAML2 providers (including ActiveDirectory, Auth0, Okta and OneLogin)’ ↩
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Base pricing is extremely variable. SSO is the greater of $15,000 or a 30% surcharge, so could be anywhere from 30% to ‘000s% ↩
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The SSO pricing for the Pro Plan is charged as an addon with a flat rate of $150 per month. The base price for the Pro Plan is $20 per month per user. ↩
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The SSO pricing is charged on a flat rate of 100 GBP per month. The base pricing of the tool is charging pay as you go. ↩
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You can add SSO to a plan for $5 per u/m ↩