Auth0 Passkeys: Product Strategy and Passkey Capabilities

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Auth0 grew from a developer-first startup into the engine behind Okta’s customer identity strategy. The platform’s evolution - from independent CIAM to “Auth0 by Okta,” which now powers the Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) - explains its pragmatic posture on passkeys. Passkeys are Generally Available for web via Universal Login and in Limited Early Access for native apps (as of August 2025). The approach favors stability and backward compatibility over "passkey‑only". This analysis traces that journey and evaluates today’s passkey reality for builders.

For broader context, see our related deep dives:

• Okta: Two-cloud strategy and passkeys
• Ping Identity: Product strategy and passkeys
• ForgeRock: Product evolution and passkeys

Questions this analysis answers:

1. How did Auth0 evolve from startup to the engine of Okta’s Customer Identity Cloud?
2. What changed with the “Auth0 by Okta” rebrand and CIC packaging?
3. What exactly is Auth0’s current passkey support on web and mobile and what are the limits?
4. What risks and operational constraints should developers plan for (domains, recovery, analytics)?
5. When should teams add a passkey‑adoption layer like Corbado on top of Auth0?

Auth0 was co-founded in early 2013 by Eugenio Pace and Matias Woloski, who embarked on building the company while living 7,000 miles apart. Their collaboration was born from a shared vision to solve a pervasive and complex problem for software developers: identity management. The core mission was to create an identity service that would eliminate the growing complexity of authentication and authorization, allowing developers to focus on their core application features rather than reinventing the security wheel.

This vision was heavily influenced by Pace's tenure at Microsoft, where he was tasked with identifying and removing obstacles for developers building applications for or migrating them to the cloud. He recognized that existing identity and access management (IAM) systems were often rigid, cumbersome and not designed with the developer experience in mind. Instead of attempting to incrementally improve existing systems, Pace and Woloski opted to build a new platform from the ground up, one that was inherently flexible, extensible and delivered as a service - an IDaaS built to be developer‑loved and enterprise‑trusted.

Auth0's commercial success was built on a deliberate and highly effective bottoms-up, developer-led go-to-market strategy. The founders understood that while developers themselves often do not control large budgets, they are a critical constituency whose technology choices frequently drive broader organizational adoption. The strategy was predicated on the hypothesis that by winning the hearts and minds of individual developers, they could "unlock budgets from others" and eventually secure large enterprise contracts.

This approach was not merely a marketing tactic but a foundational business model that created a powerful product-led growth (PLG) engine. The platform was designed to make the life of a developer "super easy," providing extensive documentation, SDKs and a low‑friction onboarding process that allowed them to integrate complex identity flows with just a few lines of code.

The validation of this model came early. In 2013, Pace celebrated the company's first-ever sale: a subscription worth just $27 per month. While modest, this transaction was an important milestone, serving as the "ultimate validation" from the market that they were creating something of tangible value. Later that same year, the company closed its first major enterprise deal for hundreds of thousands of dollars, confirming that the developer-led flywheel was working as envisioned. Developers were adopting the platform for smaller projects and then championing its use for larger, mission-critical applications within their organizations.

Auth0's timing was also a significant factor in its success. The company launched in 2013, a period when the technology landscape was seeing the rise of other highly successful developer-first companies like Twilio, Stripe and SendGrid, which validated the market's appetite for API-driven, developer-centric services.

Auth0's developer-first strategy fueled a period of rapid and sustained growth, marked by significant funding rounds and expanding user adoption. The company's financial and operational milestones illustrate its journey from an ambitious startup to a major force in the identity market.

• Seed Funding (2014): In September 2014, Auth0 announced a $2.4M seed round led by Bessemer, crossing 8,000 subscribers in 124 countries.
• Series A (2015): In June 2015, the company raised $6.875M. Subscribers tripled to 24,000 developers across 20,000 enterprises.
• Unicorn Valuation (2019): In May 2019, Auth0 surpassed a $1B valuation after a $103M Series E, serving 7,000 enterprise customers in 70+ countries.
• Final Pre-Acquisition Round (2020): In July 2020, a $120M Series F led by Salesforce Ventures valued the company at $1.9B.

Over its lifetime as an independent company, Auth0 raised a total of $333M across seven rounds, demonstrating consistent investor confidence.

On March 3, 2021, Okta announced a definitive agreement to acquire Auth0 in an all‑stock deal valued at approximately $6.5B. The deal closed in May 2021.

The acquisition was driven by a shared vision to provide "identity for the internet" and enable everyone to safely use any technology, with complementary strengths and market positions.

• Okta's Core Strength: Workforce Identity for employees, contractors and partners, sold top‑down to IT and security leaders.

• Auth0's Core Strength: Developer‑centric CIAM focused on application builders, adopted bottoms‑up and optimized for developer ergonomics.

By combining these two pillars, the acquisition effectively doubled Okta's total addressable market to a combined $55 billion. It created a single entity with best-in-class products for both major identity use cases, workforce and customer, and two distinct, powerful go-to-market engines to address them.

The acquisition was a masterful strategic move that served both offensive and defensive purposes in the highly competitive technology landscape.

From an offensive standpoint, Okta acquired its most prominent and direct competitor in the CIAM space. For customers evaluating identity solutions, particularly for customer-facing applications, Auth0 was consistently the top alternative to Okta. By absorbing Auth0, Okta not only gained its technology and revenue stream (approximately $200 million in recurring revenue at the time) but also eliminated its primary competitive threat, granting it significant pricing power and market control.

Defensively, the acquisition served as a pre-emptive strike against other major technology players. Well-founded rumors suggested that Salesforce, which had led Auth0's final funding round, was strongly considering an acquisition to bolster its own identity offerings. Given Salesforce's history of strategic acquisitions like Slack and MuleSoft, the threat was credible. By moving decisively, Okta prevented a major rival from acquiring a best-in-class identity platform and integrating it into a competing ecosystem.

Recognizing the value of Auth0's developer DNA, Okta announced that Auth0 would operate as an independent business unit, with Eugenio Pace reporting directly to Todd McKinnon.

This "independent business unit" structure was a crucial risk-mitigation strategy. The developer community had historically voiced concerns about Okta's corporate culture and perceived lack of a "developer-first" ethos. An immediate, forced merger of the two organizations would have risked a culture clash, potentially alienating the very developers and employees who constituted Auth0's core value. By maintaining Auth0's operational independence, Okta aimed to preserve the culture, talent and community goodwill that made the company a $6.5 billion asset, allowing for a more gradual and thoughtful integration over time.

Furthermore, the acquisition itself represented a tacit admission by Okta that its own platform, while adaptable for CIAM, could not organically replicate the superior developer experience and vibrant community that Auth0 had cultivated over years. Despite having its own CIAM product that generated 25% of its revenue, Okta still saw Auth0 as the market leader and a formidable competitor. The subsequent rationalization of Okta's own developer plans, which began directing new pay-as-you-go signups to Auth0's offerings, further underscored this reality. The acquisition was ultimately a strategic "buy versus build" decision, where Okta chose to acquire the market's best developer DNA rather than continue trying to build it from scratch.

In October 2023, nearly two and a half years after the acquisition, a significant branding update formalized Auth0's position within the Okta family, introducing the new "Auth0 by Okta" wordmark and icon. It was a strategic and visual alignment, not a technical migration. APIs, URLs and code libraries remained unchanged.

The rebranding was accompanied by the introduction of a clear product hierarchy designed to eliminate market confusion and delineate the distinct roles of the original Okta and Auth0 platforms. This structure is critical for understanding how the company positions its offerings to different audiences.

The dual-branding strategy is a sophisticated effort to appeal to two different, yet equally important, personas. The "Okta" brand, with its established reputation for enterprise-grade security, reliability and support, is aimed at the C-level decision-makers: the CIOs and CISOs who approve large-scale technology investments. The "Auth0" brand, which retains loyalty and trust within the developer community, is preserved at the technical level - in the code, APIs and documentation that developers interact with daily. This two-sided strategy allows the company to leverage Okta's enterprise credibility to win major contracts while simultaneously retaining the support and developer-first identity that made Auth0 a category leader.

The following table provides a definitive breakdown of this new brand and product structure:

flowchart TD
  A[2013: Auth0 founded] --> B[Auth0 Platform]
  B --> C[2021: Okta acquires Auth0]
  C --> D[2023: "Auth0 by Okta" branding]
  D -. powers .-> E[Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC)]

  style D stroke-dasharray: 3 3
  style E stroke-dasharray: 3 3

Beneath the new branding, the core Auth0 platform continues to operate as a distinct and powerful product, retaining the features that made it popular with developers, such as Universal Login, Actions for extensibility, Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA) and robust Attack Protection capabilities. The platform is consistently positioned as the developer-friendly solution for CIAM within the Okta portfolio.

Since the acquisition, the product has continued to evolve. Pricing plans have been updated to scale more predictably with monthly active users (MAUs), and new features have been introduced to better serve enterprise and multi-tenant use cases. A notable addition is "Auth0 Teams," a feature that allows customers to link multiple tenants (e.g., for development, staging, and production) under a single subscription, aggregating usage and simplifying management.

To understand Auth0's passkey implementation, it is essential to first understand the global standards upon which it is built. Passkeys are not a proprietary technology but rather a consumer-friendly term for an authentication method based on open standards developed by the FIDO Alliance and the W3C WebAuthn specification. The mission is to reduce the world's over‑reliance on passwords by promoting stronger, simpler authentication standards.

The core technical specifications that enable passkeys are:

• WebAuthn (Web Authentication): W3C standard and JavaScript API for passwordless registration and authentication using public key cryptography.

• CTAP (Client to Authenticator Protocol): FIDO protocol enabling client ↔ authenticator communication (USB/NFC/Bluetooth).

• FIDO2: Umbrella for WebAuthn + CTAP enabling secure, interoperable passwordless experiences.

By implementing these standards, Auth0 provides a phishing‑resistant authentication method, backed by major platforms like Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Auth0 has integrated passkey support into its platform, offering distinct implementation paths for web and native mobile applications.

• General Availability for Web (Universal Login): As of the first quarter of 2024, passkey authentication is Generally Available (GA) for all Auth0 plans, including the free tier. This primary implementation is designed for web-based applications and is delivered through Auth0's customizable Universal Login page. To enable this feature, however, developers must adhere to a strict set of technical prerequisites that reveal the architectural dependencies of the passkey flow:

  • The tenant must be configured to use the New Universal Login Experience.

  • The Custom Login Page feature must be disabled.

  • The authentication profile must be set to Identifier First, which separates the steps of identifying the user (e.g., entering an email) and authenticating them.

  • For the associated database connection, the "Requires Username" setting must be disabled.

  • The "Use my own database" setting must also be disabled, unless the automatic user import feature is enabled.

  • Crucially, it is strongly recommended to configure a Custom Domain before enrolling users with passkeys. A passkey is cryptographically bound to the domain on which it was created. Changing this domain later will render all existing passkeys invalid.

• Limited Early Access for Native Mobile: For native Android and iOS applications, Auth0 provides a dedicated passkey solution that is currently in a "Limited Early Access" stage. Unlike the web flow, which uses a browser redirect, the native implementation is designed to be embedded directly within the mobile application. It utilizes a combination of specific Auth0 Authentication API endpoints (e.g.,
  /passkey/register and /passkey/challenge) and the native platform APIs provided by Google and Apple, such as Android's Credential Manager. This allows for a more seamless user experience without leaving the app.

While Auth0 provides a functional and secure implementation of passkeys, an analysis from a developer's perspective reveals several important limitations and architectural constraints. These limitations reflect a cautious strategy that prioritizes enterprise stability and backward compatibility over a passwordless approach.

• No "Passkey-Only" Flow: Developers cannot fully disable passwords as an authentication method on a database connection where passkeys are enabled. Auth0 requires passwords to be available as a fallback mechanism to ensure users on older devices or browsers without passkey support can still access their accounts. This prevents a truly "passwordless-only" experience.

• Per-User Passkey Limit: The platform imposes a hard limit of 20 passkeys per user account. While this is likely sufficient for most individuals, it is a fixed constraint developers must be aware of.27

• Password-Centric Recovery: The account recovery process remains tethered to the password paradigm. If a user loses access to all their devices with passkeys, the recovery flow will guide them to reset their password, not to enroll a new passkey.

Auth0 does not publish a formal, public roadmap with long-term feature commitments. However, the company's strategic direction can be inferred from its product release stages and recent announcements. The "Limited Early Access" status of native mobile passkey support and the "Early Access" for Advanced Customizations for Universal Login (ACUL) strongly indicates that achieving General Availability for these features is a priority. The company also hosts regular product roadmap webinars to provide customers with previews of upcoming releases.

The pragmatic nature of Auth0's native passkey implementation has created a market opportunity for third-party solutions that aim to augment its capabilities. Companies like Corbado now offer products that integrate directly with Auth0. Their value proposition is built on addressing the perceived gaps in the native offering. Pre-built, optimized user interface components can drive passkey adoption rates from the 5-10% range seen in generic implementations with Auth0 to over 80%. These solutions also offer more advanced analytics, user journey insights and clearer strategies for making an entire user base fully passwordless. The existence of this ecosystem suggests that while Auth0 provides the core technical foundation for passkeys, it has not yet built the higher-level tooling and optimized user experiences required to drive mass adoption.

Turning on passkeys in Auth0 (Okta CIC) is easy. Achieving high, measurable adoption with clear ROI is hard. Corbado focuses on CIAM and adds an adoption‑and‑operations layer on top of Auth0 - without re‑platforming or migrating users.

• High adoption, proven: Passkey‑first UX and targeted prompts routinely drive +80% activation rates. Generic native Auth0 flows often see only 5–10%. Full funnel analytics and cohort views help optimize continuously.
• Faster time to value: Pre‑built UI components and SDKs reduce rollout from 12–36 months to 1–3 months.
• Measurable ROI: Up to 90% lower SMS OTP spend and 30–50% reduced support costs as passkeys replace passwords and weak MFA fallbacks.
• Insights and observability: Dashboards for end‑to‑end login funnel, passkey KPIs and operational telemetry - capabilities most IdPs like Auth0 don’t offer out of the box.

Auth0's journey from a two-person startup to a $6.5B cornerstone of Okta's identity strategy is a case study in developer‑first, product‑led growth. By relentlessly focusing on solving a complex problem with an elegant and flexible solution, Auth0 built not just a product but a loyal community, establishing itself as a leader in CIAM. The acquisition by Okta created a combined entity that addresses the full spectrum of identity use cases with distinct platforms.

The post-acquisition evolution of the platform and its branding reflects a sophisticated strategy to navigate the inherent tension between its developer-centric roots and its new role within a large, public enterprise software company. The dual-branding of "Okta Customer Identity Cloud" and "Auth0 by Okta" is a deliberate effort to speak to two critical audiences simultaneously: the enterprise buyer who values the security and stability of the Okta brand and the developer who builds on the trusted and familiar Auth0 platform.

This strategy is reflected in passkeys: standards‑based, but conservative. Passwords remain fallback, enablement requires specific prerequisites, and recovery is password‑centric, favoring a gradual transition over an all‑or‑nothing leap and leaving room for adoption tooling.

Looking forward, Auth0 must balance developer‑led innovation (native passkeys, advanced UI customization) with stability, security and backward compatibility across the Okta ecosystem.