Best CIAM for B2B SaaS
B2B SaaS has a CIAM problem that consumer apps do not: your user belongs to an organization, and that organization has its own identity rules. Picking a consumer-first platform here leads to painful workarounds.
The B2B requirements that change the shortlist
- Organizations and multi-tenancy: users belong to a company, and a person may belong to several. The data model has to be tenant-first, not user-first.
- Per-tenant SSO: each customer connects their own identity provider. One customer uses Okta, another Entra, another Google Workspace. See SSO for customer and B2B apps.
- SCIM provisioning: enterprise customers expect automatic account lifecycle, including deprovisioning on offboarding.
- Roles and permissions per tenant: an admin in one org is a member in another.
- Self-serve SSO setup: if every SSO connection needs your engineers, enterprise onboarding does not scale.
Where the money leaks
Two traps. First, the SSO tax: platforms that gate enterprise SSO to a top tier turn every enterprise deal into a margin question. Second, MAU pricing on B2B can be misaligned, because seats matter more than monthly logins. Read the pricing guide and model it against deal size.
How to evaluate
- Confirm a real organizations primitive, not a tag bolted onto users.
- Test multi-tenant SSO with two different providers in the trial.
- Confirm SCIM deprovisioning removes access immediately.
- Check whether SSO and SCIM are tier-gated, and what that tier costs at your deal volume.
- Confirm customers can self-configure SSO.
Dev-first platforms built for B2B tend to fit better here than consumer-scale suites. Use the vendor matcher, set segment to B2B SaaS, and require SSO and SCIM.