What's the difference between passkey creation & usage?

What are the main differences between passkey creation and ongoing passkey usage?#

Understanding the difference between passkey creation and ongoing passkey usage is crucial for achieving high passkey adoption rates in any organization.

Passkey Creation#

Passkey creation refers to the initial registration of passkeys by users. During this phase:

• Users must set up a passkey by verifying their identity, typically via biometrics or PIN.
• The main goal is to securely onboard users and ensure they complete the setup process.
• The focus is on making the process intuitive, frictionless, and clearly beneficial to the user to encourage widespread adoption.

Challenges include ensuring users follow through with setup and clearly communicating the value of passkeys compared to traditional login methods.

Ongoing Passkey Usage#

Ongoing passkey usage refers to daily authentication using previously created passkeys. Here, the focus shifts to:

• Consistent usage: Ensuring users regularly choose passkeys as their default login method.
• Reducing friction: Implementing strategies like automatic passkey prompts (identifier-first flows) or dedicated buttons optimized with tools like Corbado’s One-Tap Passkey Buttons and Passkey Intelligence.
• User reminders and fallback handling: Continuously nudging users towards passkeys and gracefully handling fallback situations if passkeys are unavailable.

Challenges at this stage include maintaining user habits, optimizing UX to avoid frustration (e.g., unnecessary passkey prompts), and clearly communicating the security benefits to encourage habitual usage.

Summary of Differences#

• Creation is about onboarding, initial registration, and setting user expectations.
• Ongoing usage is focused on habitual, frictionless daily authentication, user retention, and achieving high passkey login rates over time.

Both stages are essential but require distinct strategies and optimizations to maximize long-term passkey adoption success.

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About Corbado

Corbado is the Passkey Intelligence Platform for CIAM teams running consumer authentication at scale. We help you see what IDP logs and generic analytics tools can't: which devices, OS versions, browsers and credential managers support passkeys, why enrollments don't turn into logins, where the WebAuthn flow fails and when an OS / browser update silently breaks login, all without replacing Okta, Auth0, Ping, Cognito or your in-house IDP. Two products: Corbado Observe layers observability for passkeys and any other login method. Corbado Connect adds managed passkeys with analytics built in (alongside your IDP). VicRoads runs passkeys for 5M+ users with Corbado (+80% passkey activation). Talk to a Passkey Expert →