Frontegg vs BuildBase: SSO on the free plan, or 20 modules on one bill
Frontegg puts enterprise SSO on its free plan and charges $0.10 per MAU above 7,500. BuildBase is one SDK for auth, billing and workspaces. Verified prices, and where each one wins.
In short
Frontegg is CIAM with enterprise SSO and SCIM on its free plan, and a calculator charging $0.10 per monthly active user above 7,500 that stops quoting at $2,500 a month. BuildBase is one SDK for auth, billing, workspaces and email, free to 10,000 users and $19 at 25,000. Frontegg wins on identity depth.
Frontegg's pricing page has a slider. Drag it far enough and the price disappears: past 32,500 monthly active users the number is replaced by "Talk to Us". The same thing happens at 25 enterprise connections, and at 2,500 machine-to-machine tokens. All three stop at the same place, $2,500 a month, which tells you where the self-serve product ends and the sales call begins.
That ceiling is the most useful thing on the page, and it frames the whole comparison.
The one-paragraph answer
If your next three customers will ask for SAML before they sign, and you want that working this week without a plan upgrade or a WorkOS account of your own, Frontegg is the better pick and the free plan makes it easy to prove. If what you actually need is sign-in plus subscriptions plus workspaces plus the emails that go with them, all agreeing with each other on one bill, that is the case BuildBase is built for, and at 25,000 users the list prices are $1,750 and $19.
Where each fits
Frontegg is CIAM, and it goes deep. Enterprise SSO and SCIM, an embedded self-service admin portal your customers run themselves, ReBAC, hierarchical tenants, and an identity protection set that covers bot detection, impossible travel, new-device and suspicious-IP detection, stale users and accounts-at-risk analytics. Much of it ships as in-app components you drop into your product rather than screens you build.
BuildBase's centre is the workspace. Someone signs in, belongs to workspaces with roles, and each workspace carries a plan, quotas, credits and invoices. Auth is the front door to that and one of 20 modules in a single instance. You do not get a tenant security centre component. You do get the billing that Frontegg leaves to you.
What Frontegg's calculator charges, verified 3 November 2026
Frontegg publishes two plans. Pay as you go is $0 a month, and its always-included list is 7,500 monthly active users, 5 enterprise connections for SSO or SCIM, unlimited organizations, a custom domain and a fully customised hosted login. Enterprise is custom, and adds multiple environments, advanced fraud protection, a 99.99% uptime SLA and premium support.
Everything above the free allowance is metered, and the calculator is linear:
| What you move | Free allowance | Rate above it |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | 7,500 | $0.10 each |
| Enterprise connections | 5 | $125 each |
| M2M tokens | none | $1 each monthly |
The rates hold exactly until the total reaches $2,500 a month. At 10,000 users the calculator reads $250, at 25,000 it reads $1,750, at 32,500 it reads $2,500, and at 33,000 it stops quoting. Enterprise connections do the same thing at 25, and M2M tokens at 2,500.
So "pay as you go" is true over a defined range, and that range is narrower than the sliders suggest. Worth knowing before you plan around it.
Our pricing beside it
BuildBase publishes four plans. Free is $0 with 10,000 monthly active users. Launch is $19 a month with 25,000, Grow $49 with 100,000, and Scale $99 with 500,000. Free has no trial and stops at its allowance; the paid plans open with a 7-day trial that does not ask for a card.
Put both on the same user counts, at list price, with no extra Frontegg connections or M2M tokens beyond the free allowance:
| Monthly active users | Frontegg | BuildBase |
|---|---|---|
| 7,500 | $0 | $0 (Free) |
| 10,000 | $250 | $0 (Free) |
| 25,000 | $1,750 | $19 (Launch) |
| 32,500 | $2,500 | $19 (Launch) |
| 50,000 | Talk to Us | $49 (Grow) |
Two things keep that table honest. Frontegg's column buys five SSO connections and an identity product ours does not match, and our Free plan covers 10,000 users but carries no SSO at all. The gap is real, and so is what it pays for.
Key takeaway
Frontegg charges for identity and hands you the free SSO early. BuildBase charges for a backend and puts SSO late. Which is cheaper depends entirely on whether the SSO arrives before the revenue does.
Sign-in methods
Both cover what a web app needs. Frontegg's authentication list runs to password, passwordless, social logins, enterprise SSO, passkeys, MFA, bot detection, email verification, signup flows, session management and user impersonation, with a login builder for the box itself.
BuildBase ships email and password, magic links, email codes, phone codes, passkeys, Google, LinkedIn, GitHub, Microsoft, Apple, one OpenID Connect or OAuth 2.0 provider of your own, Ethereum and Solana wallets, and enterprise SSO on the Enterprise plan, through your own WorkOS account. Phone sign-in is SMS sign-in codes through your own provider, Twilio or a signed webhook. Around those sit Google One Tap, usernames, guest users and device code sign-in for CLIs and TVs. Two-step sign-in is an authenticator app, single-use backup codes or text-message codes, under one policy of off, optional or required, and an authenticator app or a passkey is the stronger choice.
Separately, every BuildBase app is an OAuth 2.0 authorization server, which is how agents and third-party apps get access. Frontegg has been building toward the same reader from the other direction, with M2M tokens, token restriction policies and an MCP server for coding assistants.
| Feature | BuildBase | Frontegg |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 10,000 MAU on Free; paid plans open with a 7-day trial without a card | 7,500 MAU and 5 enterprise connections, $0 |
| At 25,000 MAU | $19/mo (Launch) | $1,750/mo (Pay as you go) |
| Where the published price stops | Scale at $99/mo covers 500,000 MAU | $2,500/mo, then Talk to Us |
| SAML / OIDC enterprise SSO | Enterprise plan only, through your own WorkOS account | 5 connections on the free plan, $125 each after |
| Directory Sync (SCIM) | Enterprise plan, through your own WorkOS account | Shares the enterprise connection allowance |
| Identity protection | Brute-force protection and a breached-password check | Impossible travel, new device, suspicious IP, bot detection |
| Authorization model | Roles and permissions per workspace | Custom roles, permissions, ReBAC, tenant hierarchies |
| Client SDKs | Next.js, Vite, React Router / Remix, TanStack Start | React, Next.js, Angular, Vue, Swift, Kotlin, Flutter |
| Backend SDKs | JavaScript and TypeScript, on Node.js, Bun, Deno, Workers | Node.js, Go, Python FastAPI and Flask, Java |
| Billing, workspaces, email, workflows | Included, 20 modules in one instance | Not part of the product |
Where Frontegg wins
Frontegg beats us in several places, and if one of them is on your list it should win.
Enterprise SSO on the free plan. Five SAML or OIDC connections, at $0, before you have a customer. Ours is on the Enterprise plan, through your own WorkOS account, which means a conversation and a WorkOS bill of your own. For a seed-stage B2B company whose first logo wants SSO, that difference decides it.
Identity protection. Impossible travel detection, new-device detection, suspicious IP detection, accounts-at-risk analytics and a tenant security centre your customers can open themselves. We have brute-force protection and a check against breached passwords. That is not the same product.
Mobile and framework reach. Frontegg publishes SDKs for iOS Swift, Android Kotlin, React Native, Flutter and Ionic Capacitor, and on the web covers Angular, Vue.js and Vanilla.js. Our frontend SDK is React, which is four frameworks and no phone app.
Backend languages. Go, Python and Java, against our JavaScript and TypeScript. If your API is written in Go, Frontegg has a first-party SDK for it and we do not.
Authorization depth. ReBAC and hierarchical tenant structures, for products where a parent organization needs graded access to its children. Our roles and permissions are per workspace, which is simpler and sometimes too simple.
Compliance paperwork. Frontegg's Enterprise plan carries a 99.99% uptime SLA, a support SLA, custom legal agreements and a HIPAA BAA. A procurement checklist asking for any of those gets an answer from Frontegg today.
How to decide
Ask when SSO arrives relative to revenue. If an enterprise buyer is in the next two quarters and you have no WorkOS account, Frontegg's free five connections are worth more than the price gap, and you should price the billing and workspace work separately because you will still be writing it.
If instead your users are teams on a web app who subscribe, invite colleagues and hit quotas, sign-in is the small half of the problem. The WorkOS comparison makes this trade from the identity side, best auth for B2B SaaS sorts the field by whether you need SSO yet, and the real monthly cost of Clerk plus Stripe plus Lago plus Knock prices the pieces Frontegg leaves out. If isolation is what worries you, best multi-tenant backend covers who maintains that policy.
Sources
Frontegg figures verified 3 November 2026 on Frontegg's own pages: frontegg.com/pricing for the two plans, the always-included allowances, the $0.10 per monthly active user, $125 per enterprise connection and $1 per M2M token rates read off the calculator, the $2,500 point where it stops quoting, the feature comparison table and the Enterprise 99.99% uptime SLA and HIPAA BAA, and the Frontegg SDK overview for the frontend, mobile and backend SDK lists and the MCP server. BuildBase plans are our published pricing, last checked against the production plans on 31 October 2026 (PLAN_FACTS).