Read Our Comprehensive Passkeys FAQ
Further questions about passkeys?
Why are passkeys secure? What’s the difference to a security key? Get answers to many passkey-related questions our Passkeys FAQ.
A vendor-neutral guide to enterprise passkey providers: how the deployment models differ, what to put on your evaluation checklist and what a FIDO2/WebAuthn rollout actually costs.
It answers the three questions every CISO and product owner asks:
First, a quick refresher on how passkeys work at scale. Understanding the mechanics makes the vendor landscape much easier to navigate.
The enterprise passkey market splits into two groups. Full identity platforms (Okta or Auth0, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Cloud Identity Platform) give you passkeys as part of an IDP you adopt wholesale. Passkey layers (Corbado, HYPR) add passkeys to the identity provider you already run, with no migration. If your IDP is already chosen and staying, the second group is the shorter path. Beyond that, the criteria that separate providers in practice are adoption tooling, visibility across every login method and data residency, not the WebAuthn implementation itself, which is a solved standard.
A passkey is an asymmetric key pair. Registration generates a private key inside the user’s device (Secure Enclave, TPM or a credential manager); only the corresponding public key is stored server-side. During authentication the server issues a challenge that the device signs locally after biometric or PIN verification. Because the signature is cryptographically bound to your domain, a passkey created for your site cannot be used on a lookalike one. That is what makes passkeys phishing-resistant.
Running this at scale is why many organisations prefer a dedicated passkey provider. Here is what they typically offer.
Passkeys are domain-bound, so a credential created for your site cannot be replayed on a lookalike domain. A dedicated provider maintains the WebAuthn server, attestation handling and key lifecycle for you.
Provider infrastructure and pre-built rollout paths shorten time to first passkey, and absorb the traffic spikes that come with a large migration.
Managed SDKs and drop-in UI components reduce the cost of integrating passkeys into existing sign-in flows, and of keeping up as browsers ship new WebAuthn capabilities.
Supporting alignment with standards such as GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS 4.0, NIS2, NIST SP 800-63, BSI, NCSC and Essential Eight.
Now that we’ve covered the main benefits, how do you actually evaluate and select a provider? The checklist below is a starting point.
Use this checklist to benchmark enterprise passkey services and shortlist providers against your security, product and compliance goals.
Two of these deserve extra attention because they are the ones teams most often discover too late: whether the platform forces an IDP migration, and whether it can show you what happens across all your login methods rather than only the passkey path. A passkey rollout that looks healthy in isolation can still be losing users on the fallback flows.
These benchmarks show why the choice of enterprise passkey solution matters. All four figures come from the same FIDO Alliance enterprise survey.
Source: FIDO Alliance, State of Passkey Deployment in the Enterprise (2025)
Use these KPIs to build your business case for phishing-resistant passkey authentication. Next, the provider landscape.
Three roles usually sit around an enterprise passkey decision, and they are not buying the same thing. Feature lists flatten that difference. The questions below are the ones worth putting to any provider on your shortlist.
IAM product manager, head of identity
Accountable for: Whether the rollout lands, and how the numbers read to leadership.
Ask a provider: Are people not just enrolling passkeys but actually signing in with them, broken down by device, OS and user segment?
Ask for enrollment rate and passkey login share as two separate metrics. A platform that reports only enrollment cannot tell you whether behaviour changed.
Auth tech lead, platform engineer
Accountable for: Making passkeys work across the real fragmentation of devices, browsers and credential managers.
Ask a provider: When a passkey ceremony fails in production, can I see the specific client-side reason rather than a generic NotAllowedError?
Server logs stop at the WebAuthn API boundary. Ask what the platform sees inside the OS prompt and the credential manager, and how fast a platform regression surfaces.
Head of digital, conversion owner
Accountable for: Login-related drop-off, and time to resolution when something breaks.
Ask a provider: Which device and browser combinations are costing me completed logins right now?
Generic product analytics show the drop but not the cause, because they do not understand auth semantics. Ask to see a funnel that names the failing step.
A passkey programme that satisfies only one of these three tends to stall. Enrollment without usage does not survive a leadership review, usage without debuggability does not survive the first platform regression, and neither survives a conversion owner who can see the drop-off but not the cause.
Providers are listed alphabetically, not ranked. The right choice depends entirely on whether you are replacing an identity provider or adding passkeys to one you already run. Verify anything commercially material directly with the vendor before you decide.
| Criterion | Providers | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corbado | Google Cloud Identity Platform | HYPR | Microsoft Entra ID | Okta / Auth0 | |
| Deployment model | Layers on top of your existing IDP | Full identity platform on Google Cloud | Layers on top, workforce-focused | Full identity platform, Microsoft-centric | Full identity platform (replaces or becomes the IDP) |
| IDP migration required | No | Yes, if not already on GCIP | No | Yes, if not already on Entra | Yes, if not already on Okta/Auth0 |
| Primary audience | Consumer identity (CIAM) at scale | Developers, app CIAM | Workforce, high-assurance | Workforce, Microsoft estates | Both CIAM and workforce |
| Passkey adoption tooling | Enrollment prompts after any login, staged rollout and adoption funnel reporting | Automatic passkey upgrade inside Chrome and Google Password Manager | Workforce enrollment workflows | Registration campaigns for Microsoft accounts | Enrollment policies and prompts inside the Okta estate |
| Analytics across all login methods | Yes, across passkeys, password, OTP and TOTP | Basic sign-in metrics | Workforce auth events | Within the Microsoft estate | Within the Okta estate |
| Staged rollout & holdback controls | Yes, including a kill switch | Limited | Yes | Via Conditional Access policies | Via policies and feature flags |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes (region selection) | Varies by deployment | Yes (EU Data Boundary) | Yes (EU cell) |
The strongest enterprise passkey services combine security certifications, adoption visibility, rollout controls, data residency options and enterprise support. The shortlist below is alphabetical; the comparison table above shows how they differ.
The decision usually comes down to one question: are you willing to change identity providers? If yes, the full-platform vendors are in play. If no, you need something that layers on top.
Start with a proof-of-concept that measures integration effort, real user adoption and compliance fit. Prioritise platforms that:
Insist on measuring the POC against a baseline. Without before-and-after numbers on login success rate and support-ticket volume, a passkey rollout is very hard to defend at renewal.
Pricing models vary by provider but generally follow one of three structures:
Published list prices are rare at enterprise scale, and per-user rates fall sharply with volume. Expect the final number to be negotiated on SLA, data residency and support tier rather than taken from a pricing page. Budget separately for the integration work, which is frequently the larger line item in year one.
Evaluating a passkey platform is mostly a data problem: how ready your traffic is, what your current login funnel actually loses and what good looks like. These references help with all three.
Strategy, product fit, rollout planning and observability, organised by stage.
OpenEight production KPIs aggregated from real passkey deployments. The numbers to benchmark your own rollout against.
OpenLive passkey readiness data by operating system and browser. Free, no signup.
OpenWhy are passkeys secure? What’s the difference to a security key? Get answers to many passkey-related questions our Passkeys FAQ.
Get support from our passkeys community for any kind of passkey-related question or issue you face.
Prefer Reddit? We answer questions at r/passkey.
