WorkOS vs BuildBase: what you still need to buy after SSO
WorkOS handles enterprise SSO and SCIM well, but leaves billing, workspaces and email to other vendors. Here is how BuildBase compares.
In short
WorkOS is a developer-focused identity platform built for enterprise SSO, SCIM sync and audit logs in B2B SaaS. It does not include billing, workspaces or email - teams pair it with Stripe. BuildBase bundles auth, billing, workspaces, RBAC, workflows and email in one SDK; enterprise SSO is not part of it.
Most WorkOS comparisons stop at the login screen, because WorkOS is very good at exactly that screen. The question worth asking is what a B2B SaaS team is still assembling around it once SSO works.
WorkOS answers one part of a SaaS backend better than almost anyone. It was never trying to answer the rest, and the rest is where a second, third and fourth vendor bill shows up.
The one-paragraph answer
Pick WorkOS if an enterprise buyer is asking for SAML or SCIM this quarter and you want the tool built specifically for that problem, with a self-serve portal their IT admin can configure directly. Pick BuildBase if auth is one of several systems you still need - billing, workspaces, roles, quota enforcement - and you would rather run one instance than add WorkOS on top of Stripe on top of your own permissions code and keep all of it in sync by hand.
What each one actually is
WorkOS is a developer-focused identity platform built around one problem: getting a B2B app to enterprise-ready authentication fast. SSO, SCIM directory sync, audit logs, and a self-serve Admin Portal that lets a customer's own IT team configure their SSO connection without WorkOS or your team in the loop. It is narrow by design, and the depth shows in exactly the area it targets.
BuildBase is the opposite shape. Twenty modules ship as one instance
behind @buildbase/sdk - authentication, billing and subscriptions,
workspaces, role-based access, workflow automation, email. Seven sign-in
methods are built in: email and password, Google, LinkedIn, GitHub,
Microsoft, magic links and passkeys, plus API tokens for
server-to-server calls. If the full 20-module bundle is more than you want,
Kinde sits in between - auth with billing
bolted on, short of a whole backend.
What is missing from that list matters here: no SAML, no enterprise SSO connections, no SCIM. If a deal is blocked on a security questionnaire asking for those, this is the wrong tool today.
Key takeaway
WorkOS optimizes for enterprise identity done right. BuildBase optimizes for not needing five vendors to ship the rest of a SaaS product - though we do not offer enterprise SSO at all.
Where the two overlap, and where they do not
Both handle sign-in for a B2B app. WorkOS's User Management product covers email and social sign-in the same way BuildBase's authentication module does, and both exist as one piece of a larger platform rather than the whole product.
The overlap ends there, though less completely than it did in August. WorkOS still has no native subscription billing - the commonly reported pattern is pairing it with Stripe, and WorkOS now ships its own Stripe add-ons to make that pairing less manual. Seat counts and entitlements sync across; plans, invoicing, dunning and tax stay in Stripe. There is no multi-tenant workspace model past "Organizations", no workflow automation for your own application logic, and no transactional or campaign email beyond the auth flow itself. Each of those is a vendor you add, a bill that scales on its own axis, and an integration that has to agree with WorkOS about who the user is.
Roles are the claim worth correcting. An earlier edition of this post said WorkOS stopped at organization membership. It does not. AuthKit ships custom roles scoped to an organization, with named permissions you reference in code by slug, assignable through SCIM or directory groups, plus a separate fine-grained authorization product alongside. If RBAC alone were the reason you were reading this, that gap has closed.
That is not a flaw in WorkOS. It chose depth on one problem over breadth across many, the same tradeoff Auth0 and Clerk make - WorkOS just specializes further, into the enterprise-SSO slice specifically rather than identity broadly.
Comparing the shape of each product
| Feature | BuildBase | WorkOS |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | Auth, billing, workspaces, RBAC and workflows on one instance | Enterprise SSO, SCIM directory sync, audit logs, Admin Portal |
| Enterprise SSO / SAML / SCIM | Not available | Core product, self-serve Admin Portal for customer IT admins |
| Subscription billing | Built in: plans, credits, usage quotas | Not included; Stripe add-ons sync seats and entitlements |
| Multi-tenant workspaces | Built in | Basic "Organizations" concept, not a full workspace model |
| Permissions / RBAC | Built in, org- and workspace-scoped roles | Custom org-scoped roles and permissions |
| Built in: Google, Mailgun, custom SMTP | Not included | |
| Pricing | Launch $49/mo, Grow $99/mo, Scale $199/mo | Free to 1M MAU; SSO/SCIM from $125/connection |
Pricing
Our numbers are published and simple: Launch at $49 a month, Grow at $99, Scale at $199, each with more monthly active users, workspaces and storage than the last. No free plan, but a 7-day trial that does not ask for a card. Full details are at /pricing.
WorkOS's User Management product, AuthKit, is free for the first 1M monthly active users, and that includes email and password, social login, passkeys, MFA and magic auth. Worth stating without a hedge: at the scale most products actually run at, the auth line on a WorkOS bill is zero, and we have no answer to that number. Our entry plan is $49 a month for 25,000 MAU.
The million is a cliff, not a slope. Cross it and AuthKit is $2,500/mo for each additional 1M MAU, which is worth modelling before you grow into it rather than after.
What WorkOS mostly bills for is the enterprise part. SSO and SCIM directory sync are priced per customer connection, and the published bands step down with volume: $125 each for the first 15, $100 from 16 to 30, $80 from 31 to 50, then $65 from 51 to 100. Past a hundred connections it is quoted custom. Audit logs price separately again: $125/mo per SIEM streaming connection, and $99/mo per 1M events retained. There is still no published platform fee, though a custom domain runs $99/mo and the Scale support tier is $1,000/mo. (Every WorkOS figure on this page verified against workos.com/pricing on 6 October 2026.)
So the bill tracks how many enterprise logos you land far more than how much your product is used - until the MAU line catches up with you. That is a reasonable trade if enterprise SSO is the thing selling the deal. Fifteen connections at $125 is $1,875 a month, and if those fifteen are enterprise contracts, that is not the line item anyone is arguing about. It is a stranger one if most of your customers never ask for SSO at all, because what you pay for is the connections you hold open, not what your product does.
Where WorkOS wins
Enterprise SSO and SCIM, done by specialists. This is WorkOS's entire reason to exist, and it shows. We do not ship SAML, enterprise SSO connections or SCIM directory sync at all. If a buyer's security team is asking for any of those this quarter, WorkOS wins that deal outright and there is no way to argue around it.
A self-serve Admin Portal, included free. WorkOS gives a customer's own IT admin a portal to configure their SSO or SCIM connection directly, without your team or WorkOS's in the loop for routine setup. It ships in every account at no extra charge, with setup paths written per identity provider - Okta, Entra ID, ADFS, OneLogin, PingFederate, JumpCloud and a long tail beyond them. That catalog is the part nobody mentions when they estimate building this themselves. BuildBase has no equivalent construct anywhere in its module catalog - there is nothing for an enterprise buyer's admin to self-serve here, because there is no enterprise identity layer to configure.
If you are choosing between them
The tell is whether an enterprise security questionnaire is already on your desk. If it is, and SAML or SCIM is a checkbox you cannot skip, WorkOS solves that specific problem better than we do, full stop - we do not ship it and are not the right tool for that deal this quarter.
If you are earlier than that - building the product, still deciding on workspaces and roles, not yet fielding enterprise security reviews - WorkOS gets you enterprise-ready identity you may not need for another year, and leaves billing, workspaces and permissions as separate problems regardless. Charging per API call or enforcing usage quotas on top of WorkOS means building that layer from scratch either way.
If you landed here comparing WorkOS against several options rather than just us, Clerk alternatives covers WorkOS alongside Supabase, SuperTokens and Kinde, each mapped to the specific complaint it answers.