Corbado Recognized in Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Digital Identity 2025 for Multidevice Passkeys

Our inclusion, alongside key research on user experience, validates the critical shift towards phishing-resistant, user-centric authentication—a future we're building today.

The digital identity landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation and 2025 marks an important year in this evolution. Corbado is proud to announce its recognition as a selected Vendor for Multidevice passkeys in the prestigious Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Digital Identity 2025 (released July 14, 2025). This acknowledgment places Corbado among the key players shaping the future of secure, passwordless authentication.

This milestone is amplified by a second, equally significant mention in Gartner research, Make Customer Authentication Simple and Smooth to Optimize UX (released July 31, 2025). The convergence of these two recognitions from a world-leading technology research and consulting firm validates the technological maturity and enterprise-readiness of passkeys and underscores the strategic business imperative of a frictionless user experience.

Together, these acknowledgments confirm a paradigm shift that Corbado has championed since its inception: the era of forcing a choice between robust security and intuitive user experience is definitively over. For decades, digital security has been a story of trade-offs, where stronger protection inevitably meant more friction for the user. Passkey technology is the first mainstream authentication method to break this cycle, delivering a solution that is simultaneously more secure and dramatically simpler to use, as outlined in Microsoft’s overview of passkeys and our in‑depth analysis of passkey security benefits.

The market has evolved to a point where the success of an authentication technology is no longer measured by its cryptographic strength alone, but by its ability to drive positive business outcomes. The reason passkeys are maturing so successfully and gaining enterprise traction is precisely because they solve the persistent user experience problem that has plagued previous security innovations. Gartner's dual recognition of Corbado - within the context of both the technology's lifecycle and its impact on the customer journey - validates this new reality. The winning formula is no longer just "secure," but "secure, simple, and smooth," and Corbado is at the forefront of delivering this integrated value proposition to enterprises globally, as detailed in Why Corbado.

For technology leaders, CISOs and product executives, the Gartner Hype Cycle is an great tool for navigating the area of emerging technologies. It provides a graphical representation of a technology's journey from conception to mainstream adoption, helping organizations make informed, strategic decisions about their technology investments.

Each Hype Cycle maps the evolution of an innovation through five distinct phases, providing a clear snapshot of its perceived value and market penetration:

1. Innovation Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest generate significant publicity, but often no commercially viable products exist.

2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: A wave of early publicity produces numerous success stories, often accompanied by failures. The technology is pushed to its limits, leading to both excitement and unrealistic expectations.

3. Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver on the initial hype. Many providers shake out or fail. Investment continues only if surviving vendors can improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.

4. Slope of Enlightenment: The technology's real-world benefits begin to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear, and more enterprises begin to fund pilots as best practices emerge.

5. Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption takes off. The technology's broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off, and its value is stable and well-understood.

Enterprises leverage the Hype Cycle to develop multi-year technology roadmaps, evaluate market opportunities, and monitor competitor strategies. It allows them to distinguish between fleeting trends and genuinely transformative solutions, ensuring that investments are timed correctly to maximize ROI and minimize risk.

Within this framework, being named a Sample Vendor carries significant weight. It is not a passive mention but an active identification by Gartner analysts of a company that is representative and notable within a specific technology category. For enterprises conducting strategic analysis, Sample Vendors serve as a vetted starting point for their evaluation process.

This recognition acts as a powerful catalyst, moving a technology and its providers from the periphery of an enterprise's awareness to the center of its active evaluation and procurement cycle. When an identity architect or CISO consults the Hype Cycle for Digital Identity, they are not just learning about a trend; they are being presented with a pre-vetted shortlist of vendors to investigate for their next budget cycle. This effectively shortens the sales process and places Corbado directly into consideration for high-value enterprise projects, transforming a general market trend into a specific, actionable opportunity.

The position of Multidevice passkeys in the 2025 Hype Cycle indicates that the technology is rapidly advancing along the Slope of Enlightenment. Having navigated the initial hype and subsequent disillusionment that often accompanies new innovations, passkeys are now demonstrating clear, quantifiable benefits, supported by a mature ecosystem and growing enterprise adoption. The evidence for this ascent is overwhelming and can be seen across market readiness, proven business impact and broad industry commitment, with live readiness data on state‑of‑passkeys.io.

The foundational infrastructure for a passwordless future is already in place.

• Ubiquitous Device Support: Over 95% of all iOS and Android devices are now passkey-ready. Major platforms from Apple, Google and Microsoft have fully integrated passkey support across their operating systems and browsers, making the technology accessible to billions of users without requiring them to install new software.

• Rapidly Growing User Awareness: Driven by rollouts from major consumer brands, user awareness of passkeys has surged. Recent PCMag survey findings show that 75% of people are now "aware" of the technology, normalizing the experience at unprecedented scale.

The "enlightenment" phase is characterized by concrete, data-driven success stories that showcase a technology's value.

• Adoption by Tech Giants: The scalability and user acceptance of passkeys are no longer in question. Google has over 800 million accounts using passkeys, and Amazon onboarded 175 million users in the first year alone. Microsoft has also expanded passkey support across its entire ecosystem, including Xbox and Microsoft 365.

• Quantifiable User Experience Gains: The benefits are not just anecdotal. Amazon users log in 6x faster with passkeys, while TikTok users are an astonishing 17x faster. Microsoft reports a 98% sign-in success rate with passkeys, compared to just 32% for traditional passwords.

• Tangible Business Results: These UX improvements translate directly to the bottom line. Air New Zealand saw a 50% reduction in login abandonment after implementing passkeys. Dashlane experienced a 70% increase in sign-in conversion rate, and CVS Health reported a 98% drop in mobile account takeover (ATO) fraud.

The momentum is supported by a united industry effort to move beyond passwords. The FIDO Alliance, the open industry association behind passkey standards, actively promotes adoption through initiatives like World Passkey Day. Furthermore, over 100 leading organizations have signed the "Passkey Pledge," committing to accelerating the transition to this more secure and user-friendly authentication method.

This widespread adoption by major consumer-facing brands is creating an inevitable "expectation cascade." Users who experience seamless, biometric logins with Google, Amazon, and PayPal in their personal lives will grow increasingly intolerant of cumbersome, password-based authentication in other contexts. This sets a new baseline for what "good" authentication feels like. When these same users—as employees, customers, and partners—encounter legacy systems, the friction becomes more pronounced and frustrating. This frustration translates into direct business challenges, from higher cart abandonment in e-commerce to increased helpdesk tickets in the enterprise. Therefore, consumer passkey adoption is not a separate trend; it is a powerful force driving enterprise demand. Organizations that fail to adopt passkeys will soon be perceived as laggards, not just in security, but in fundamental user experience.

The second Gartner mention—Make Customer Authentication Simple and Smooth to Optimize UX—elevates the conversation about passkeys from a purely technical discussion to a strategic business imperative. It confirms that the authentication process is no longer a siloed security function but a critical touchpoint in the overall customer experience (CX) that directly impacts revenue and loyalty.

For too long, the login and sign-up process has been treated as a necessary hurdle rather than a strategic opportunity. This friction has a tangible business cost - 47% of consumers will abandon a purchase if they have forgotten their password for an account. Gartner's focus on CX reinforces this reality, urging leaders to probe for unmet customer needs and optimize the core user journey before investing in new features. Any experience that is not valued or easily adopted by customers cannot deliver its promised benefits.

Authentication is the digital front door to any service. A difficult, frustrating, or insecure experience at this first interaction can poison the entire customer relationship, regardless of the quality of the product or service that follows. This is why the principles of human-centric design are now being applied to what was once the exclusive domain of security engineering.

Passkeys are the definitive answer to this long-standing conflict. They are architected to be both fundamentally more secure and vastly more convenient than any mainstream predecessor.

• Superior Security: By using public-key cryptography, passkeys are inherently resistant to phishing, as the credential is bound to the specific domain it was created for. There are no shared secrets (like passwords or OTP codes) to be stolen from a server or intercepted in transit.

• Superior User Experience: The login process is reduced to a simple, familiar biometric action like Face ID or a fingerprint scan. This is 2-4x faster than typing a password and eliminates the frustration of password resets and forgotten credentials entirely, as demonstrated in Why Corbado.

This seamless experience is a foundational element for the broader goals of modern Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs). Vendors like Adobe, Salesforce, and Liferay aim to create cohesive, personalized, and positive customer journeys, and a frictionless authentication process is an essential prerequisite for achieving that vision, as reflected in Gartner Peer Insights for DXPs.

By tying authentication performance directly to core business metrics, the investment conversation shifts. A passkey solution is no longer just a line item in the CISO's security budget—a cost center focused on risk mitigation. It becomes a strategic investment for the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Revenue Officer to drive growth—a profit center. The ROI can be calculated using metrics from across the business: higher conversion rates from marketing, reduced cart abandonment from sales, and lower support overhead from operations. This allows organizations to approach passkey adoption not as a defensive security upgrade, but as a proactive strategy for business acceleration.

While Gartner has expertly identified the "what" (multidevice passkeys) and the "why" (superior security and user experience), Corbado provides the definitive "how" for enterprises looking to capitalize on this transformation. Our platform is engineered not just to implement passkeys, but to maximize their business value through intelligent optimization and risk-free integration.

Successful passkey implementation is measured by user adoption, not just technical deployment. Corbado's proprietary Passkey Intelligence™ engine is designed to solve the adoption challenge. It analyzes over 100 signals per login—including device type, OS version, browser capabilities, and user context—to deliver an optimized and intelligent user journey. It gracefully handles buggy OS versions, avoids prompting users on unsupported devices, and presents the right call-to-action at the right time. This intelligence-driven approach is why customers see up to 10x higher passkey adoption rates compared to standard or in-house solutions.

Many large-scale IT projects fail due to the complexity and risk of data migration. Corbado's architecture eliminates this barrier entirely. Our platform is designed to augment, not replace, an organization's existing Identity Provider (IdP) or Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) system. This "No Migration Required" approach allows enterprises to add passkey functionality alongside their current authentication methods, avoiding costly, disruptive, and high-risk user migration projects. With our SDKs, pre-built UI components, and IdP connectors, enterprises can go live with passkeys in weeks, not months or quarters, achieving an unprecedented time-to-value.

To justify a strategic investment, leaders need to prove its value. The Corbado platform provides a comprehensive analytics dashboard that offers full transparency into the metrics that matter. Organizations can track adoption funnels, monitor login success rates, analyze user journeys and calculate the tangible ROI from reduced SMS-OTP costs and lower support ticket volume. This allows our clients to demonstrate the positive business impact of their passkey initiative to every stakeholder, from the CISO to the CFO. Our commitment to enterprise-grade security and compliance is further validated by our ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certifications.

The decision to adopt passkeys often comes down to a "build vs. buy" analysis. The following table clarifies the stark difference in outcomes between leveraging an enterprise-grade platform like Corbado and attempting a do-it-yourself implementation.

The digital identity landscape is becoming increasingly complex, fragmented, and targeted by adversaries. As the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Identity 2025 confirms, the path forward lies in adopting mature, user-centric technologies that can unify security and experience. Passkeys are at the vanguard of this movement, having firmly established their position on the Slope of Enlightenment and proven their value across global enterprises, with live adoption metrics on state‑of‑passkeys.io.

Corbado provides the most intelligent, efficient, and risk-free path for organizations to embrace this passwordless future. By focusing on maximizing user adoption, eliminating implementation friction, and delivering quantifiable business results, our platform turns Gartner's strategic insights into tangible enterprise value.

To begin your journey toward stronger security, seamless user experiences, and measurable ROI, we invite you to take the next step.

• Talk to a Passkey Expert: Engage with our specialists to discuss your unique challenges and discover how a tailored passkey strategy can accelerate your business goals.

• Calculate your Passkey ROI: Use our data-driven tools to project the specific financial benefits - from SMS cost savings to reduced support overhead - that passkey adoption can bring to your organization.

• Explore our Passkey Adoption Platform: Take a deeper dive into the technical architecture, security features, and integration capabilities of the Corbado Passkey Adoption Platform.