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Okta sells software that lets companies verify who their employees and customers are when they log in, and manages their access to apps.
Okta sells the digital bouncer that stands at the door of a company's apps. When an employee logs into their work email, payroll system, or a hundred other tools, Okta is often the thing checking their identity and deciding what they're allowed to open. It does the same job for a company's customers — say, when you log into an app on your phone and it asks for a password or a fingerprint scan.
The product comes in two flavors that mirror those two audiences. Workforce Identity is sold to IT departments, and it connects a company's employees to all their internal software while enforcing rules like requiring a second factor beyond a password. Customer Identity is sold to companies that build apps and websites, giving their end users a smooth, secure sign-in. Both are rented as subscriptions, priced by the number of users, so Okta's revenue is recurring and grows as its customers hire more people or sign up more users. Customers pick Okta because building this plumbing yourself is hard and risky, and because Okta's system already works with thousands of popular apps out of the box. The obvious rival is Microsoft, which bundles similar identity features into its broader cloud offerings, so Okta constantly has to justify standing alone. Okta's answer is neutrality: it works with everything, rather than pushing customers toward one tech giant's ecosystem. The company has grown fast but has also burned cash, and it has made big acquisitions to expand — notably Auth0, a developer-friendly customer login tool, bought for roughly $6.5 billion in 2021. That deal deepened its push into the customer side, though it also loaded the company with debt and arrived just as investors soured on expensive software deals.
The business matters more than it sounds, because identity is where breaches often start. A stolen password is the burglar's favorite key, and Okta's whole pitch is making that key harder to steal and less useful if it is. That also makes Okta a juicy target: it has disclosed security incidents of its own, and a compromise at Okta could ripple out to thousands of its customers. So the company sells trust as much as software — and every scare is a reminder of both why customers need it and why they worry about relying on it.
Saved answer · last researched 21 Oct 2026