An MSP-centric look at the pros and cons of using Microsoft Entra ID versus Okta and ZeroTek for identity and access management.
Bottom Line Up Front
Okta's cloud-first, vendor-neutral platform outperforms Microsoft Entra ID for MSPs on every key dimension—faster and more reliable deployments, instant policy enforcement (versus up to 24-hour Entra latency), 8,000+ pre-built SSO integrations, and MSP-exclusive consumption-based licensing through ZeroTek.
Key Takeaways
ZeroTek makes it easy for MSPs to upgrade to Okta and deliver Okta’s enterprise-class identity and access management (IAM) technology to their SMB customers.
Okta lets MSPs deploy and scale faster and more reliably than Entra ID or on-premises identity directories.
Okta closes security gaps Microsoft leaves open and, as a cloud-first, vendor-neutral platform, empowers MSPs to evolve continually.
What’s the best IAM solution for MSPs?
How you’re managing identity and access could be stalling growth for you and your customers. This article takes an MSP-centric look at the pros and cons of using Okta vs Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) for identity and access management.
Microsoft seems like a no-brainer until needs evolve
It’s common for MSPs to start with Microsoft Entra ID and lean on Conditional Access to manage who has access to what and when. And why not? The technology is already there, and your techs already know Microsoft, right?
But soon the limitations of Conditional Access outweigh any convenience for MSPs who want to scale, increase scope and complexity, or standardize the tech stack across customers. MSPs have told us for years about:
Entra ID’s poor compatibility with non-Microsoft apps.
Significant challenges getting the security experience to work as expected—even with experienced techs and investment in higher Microsoft product tiers.
The blood-pressure-raising difficulty in getting support from Microsoft—even with a paid support plan, and critical, service-affecting issues.
MSPs eliminate these problems for themselves and their customers by:
Upgrading from Entra ID and Conditional Access to Okta, the world’s leading enterprise-class identity and access management (IAM) solution.
Delivering Okta through ZeroTek, a SaaS platform and company purpose-built to bring the power of Okta to MSPs and their SMB customers.
Okta’s cloud-first, vendor-neutral platform produces significantly faster and more reliable deployments
For MSPs or MSP customers deeply integrated with Microsoft and with no other SaaS applications, Entra ID may be sufficient.
Faster app integrations, less custom work
But introduce popular SaaS apps like Zoom, BambooHR, Slack, and Zendesk—or niche tools like Epic, Cerner, or Clio for security-sensitive industries like healthcare and law—and managing identities and access with Entra ID becomes more challenging.
When integrating apps with Entra ID, MSPs often need to build and maintain custom API connectors to achieve the desired functionality. This can result in significant deployment delays and opportunity costs.
In comparison, integrating, configuring, and deploying an app with secure single sign-on (SSO) through Okta typically takes MSPs less than an hour. As a vendor-neutral platform built for the cloud, Okta accelerates deployment and adoption, offering 8000+ pre-built connectors for the apps you and your customers use daily.
Rapid, reliable provisioning and deprovisioning across apps and customers
Even better, Okta’s Lifecycle Management (LCM) makes it straightforward to automate rapid user provisioning and deprovisioning for 800+ of those easily integrated apps, including Microsoft Office 365 (M365), Entra ID, SharePoint, and Intune. Leveraging Okta’s LCM means you can onboard users with secure access to all the apps they need in minutes and instantly cut off all access when it’s time to offboard.
This is a security control, not just an operational convenience: automated deprovisioning eliminates orphaned accounts and locks a departing user out of every app at once — a gap attackers love to exploit. And the breadth advantage isn’t limited to single sign-on: just as Okta offers far more pre-built SSO connectors than Microsoft, it supports automated provisioning and deprovisioning across far more apps — 800+ — where Microsoft supports just over 360, less than half as many.
Okta’s vendor-neutral commitment means MSPs can use Okta to secure a growing range of systems and tools, including:
Google Workspace
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments such as VMWare Horizon
VPN solutions
On-prem Active Directory
Mac devices
— all using a single Okta identity.
What the analysts say — and what they miss for MSPs
The analysts keep landing in the same place. Gartner has named Okta a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Access Management for nine consecutive years — every year since the report’s 2017 debut — for both ability to execute and completeness of vision. Forrester named Okta a Leader in its 2026 Wave for Workforce Identity Security Platforms for the second time running, with nine top scores of 5/5. And by Okta’s own count, two-thirds of the Fortune 100 trust Okta — the same enterprise-grade platform ZeroTek puts within reach of your SMB customers.
A fair reading of those reports: at the platform level, Okta and Microsoft are both Leaders, and reasonable people can argue over who edges ahead on any given axis. But that argument misses what matters for an MSP. The analysts score these platforms for enterprises buying identity for a single organization — not for a service provider delivering standardized enterprise-class identity across dozens of tenants, billed month-to-month, from one console. On that dimension, ZeroTek + Okta isn’t close to Microsoft. It’s a different class of tool.
MSPs want to deliver the best tools for their customers, not the best tools for Microsoft
Okta’s vendor-neutral approach means MSPs can architect, deliver, and continually evolve a top-tier security service using the leading third-party tools that are best for their customers, not just the tools that work best with Microsoft.
Security-conscious MSPs can integrate Okta with things like:
Unified endpoint management (UEM) and mobile device management (MDM) platforms as part of their device trust strategy.
HR-as-a-Service (HRaaS) systems for seamless end-to-end identity management.
Extended detection and response (XDR) tools like SentinelOne and CrowdStrike for extra layers of security. (Read more about how SentinelOne Singularity XDR can complement Okta’s contextual awareness and prevent malicious actors from advancing laterally across attack surfaces.)
When you use Okta, you and your customers are never locked in—you can retire, replace, and add apps anytime to meet changing needs and take advantage of new technological developments.
Okta closes security gaps Microsoft leaves open
Enforcement speed — instant vs. up to a day
Time is of the essence when there’s a security event. When you need to grant access — or, more urgently, cut it off — what matters is how fast and how completely that change takes hold across every app a user can reach. Enforcement speed has long been a weak spot for Entra ID, so it’s worth being precise about where it still is one.
Microsoft has narrowed part of this gap, and it’s worth saying so plainly: Continuous Access Evaluation (CAE) can react within a live session to specific security events — a password change, a jump in user risk, MFA being enabled — and revoke or re-challenge access in near-real-time. But CAE is event-triggered, not a general policy-propagation engine: it reduces the enforcement delay, it doesn’t eliminate the lag. And its limits matter for MSPs, which Microsoft spells out on CAE’s own documentation page. It covers Microsoft’s own CAE-aware workloads (Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, Graph) and supporting clients; it does not blanket the third-party SaaS estate you manage. And for the everyday admin actions of editing a Conditional Access policy or changing a user’s group membership — the way access is actually granted and revoked at scale — Microsoft states the change can take up to a day to fully take effect as it replicates to resource providers, optimized to about two hours in some but not all scenarios. The only way to force it through immediately is to manually revoke each affected user’s refresh tokens or session, one user at a time — an operational tax that multiplies across every tenant an MSP runs.
Automated deprovisioning closes every door at once
Okta applies and revokes access immediately and uniformly. Deactivate a user and Okta instantly blocks single sign-on to every connected app — no replication queue, no per-user manual override, no checking whether the app happens to be CAE-aware. For 800+ of those apps, Lifecycle Management goes a step further and automatically deprovisions the downstream account itself, tearing down the access rather than just ending the session. Microsoft supports automated provisioning and deprovisioning for just over 360 apps — less than half of Okta’s coverage — so more of that cleanup falls back on your team, tenant by tenant.
A consistent, secure baseline across every tenant
Enforcement speed and clean offboarding both depend on something more fundamental: every tenant actually having the right security configuration in the first place. In Entra, that baseline is built and maintained tenant by tenant — and it drifts. ZeroTek’s ZeroConfig feature lets you define your Okta security baseline once and deploy it across every customer org from a single console, then check for configuration drift instead of re-auditing each tenant by hand. So when you tighten a policy in response to a new threat, that change reaches every client the same way, at the same time — not whenever someone gets to it.
Real-time logs speed up troubleshooting
Microsoft log update delays can also hobble your team’s troubleshooting efficiency. How can anyone fully understand and resolve a problem quickly without all the relevant information? Okta’s event logs update in near-real-time, so investigations aren’t left waiting on data to surface.
Built-in threat detection at the front door
There are other security advantages with Okta. For example, at the pre-authentication stage, Okta ThreatInsight enhances Okta’s contextual access policies by automatically aggregating and analyzing data about sign-in activity across Okta’s global customer base. By detecting potentially malicious IP addresses and “informing” Okta policies about threat levels, Okta ThreatInsight can prevent credential-based attacks, including:
Password spraying
Credential stuffing
Brute-force cryptographic attacks
Reliability and breach scope
Finally, MSPs need reliability. Both Okta and Microsoft commit to a 99.99% uptime SLA for their core identity services, and both have strong track records of meeting it. Where the two diverge is in the scope and severity of the security incidents they’ve experienced — and that difference matters more than a raw breach count.
Both vendors have been breached, and Okta has owned its share. But there’s a distinction between the two. Okta’s incidents have hit peripheral systems — a sub-processor, a source-code repository, its support desk — not the production service that issues and signs your users’ tokens. Microsoft’s most serious identity breach did reach that level: attackers obtained a signing key and forged authentication tokens. When you’re deciding where identity should live, that difference matters.
Okta makes it easier for MSPs to configure context-appropriate security
MSPs tell us how frustrating it is to keep up with all the admin portal changes and features moving around in Entra ID and Microsoft 365, often several times a year.
Okta’s policy engine is flexible and intuitive, making it easier for MSPs to configure context-appropriate security and authentication experiences for users. “Okta policies are much more granular and easier to configure than Microsoft Conditional Access, and then ZeroTek lets us automate and streamline deployment of those policies,” says Dan Le, CEO of Red Cup IT, an MSP and ZeroTek partner. "So that’s a big reduction in administrative overhead.”
To give MSP admins and technicians a greater boost, the Okta-certified experts at ZeroTek have developed and documented MSP-specific best practices for configuring Okta policies and security settings based on extensive testing, collaboration with MSP partners, and years of working closely with Okta’s research and development team.
Okta makes it easy to delight your customers
Okta’s attention to the finer details of the user experience means MSPs can deliver the low-friction, high-assurance access to apps that their customers demand. You can configure Okta to:
Use any authentication factor from any vendor for any user or group of users—or, just as easily, standardize on the best authenticators.
Use a number challenge with push notification only for high-risk sign-on.
Protect customers from user enumeration attackers who try to identify user accounts and authentication enrolments.
Detect lockouts caused by unknown devices, email end users about key security events occurring with their accounts, and allow end users to report suspicious activity to your support desk.
While Microsoft offers limited customized branding for the user experience, Okta allows you to create a custom vanity URL and customize brand colors, images, and terminology, as well as the user sign-in page, dashboard, and all emails.
MSPs need cost transparency and MSP-friendly licensing
The baseline everyone assumes is free
For many MSPs, Microsoft appears to be less expensive than Okta. But the price advantage vanishes when you factor in Microsoft’s hidden costs, which include required license upgrades, infrastructure, deployment, maintenance, integration time, and the ongoing burden of custom coding required to manage identity and access. SMB clients on Microsoft are probably on Microsoft 365 Business Premium, which bundles Entra ID P1 alongside Office, Intune, and Defender. Switching to Okta doesn’t mean replacing the suite; it simply sits in front as the identity control plane.
Three places Okta + ZeroTek pulls ahead
So what about costs? The cost comparison that matters isn’t the bundled baseline; it’s what it takes to deliver security beyond it, across a whole book of clients. That’s where Okta through ZeroTek pulls ahead on three fronts Microsoft’s model structurally can’t match:
The step-up layer. When a client needs more than the baseline — risk-based access, identity governance, threat protection, device access — Microsoft’s path is to push P2 or E5 across the estate on an annual commitment. ZeroTek lets you add exactly the capabilities your client needs, month-to-month, with no annual lock-in.
The flexibility penalty. To get Microsoft’s list prices, you commit for a year; the true month-to-month rate — the one that lets you cancel or drop seats any month — runs about 20% more per SKU. With ZeroTek, month-to-month is the standard, and that flexibility costs you nothing.
The layer you own. With P1 riding inside the Microsoft bundle, identity is a line item you pass through rather than a service you control. Put Okta in front and identity becomes something you deliver, price, and stand behind yourself — a capability you own end to end, not a fixed cost dictated by another vendor. That’s a materially stronger commercial position, and one Microsoft’s model doesn’t offer.
The largest cost is time
And the largest cost of all is time. Even where P1 rides “free” in the bundle, achieving strong security outcomes in Entra across many tenants is labor-intensive — per-tenant configuration, constant portal churn, and custom connectors. Okta through ZeroTek flips that. With thousands of pre-built app integrations — most deployed in under an hour — you stand up a proven, standardized security baseline across every tenant from a single console, then tailor it to each client through Okta’s app integrations. That’s what MSPs rarely get from Microsoft: the freedom to shape security around every customer and the efficiency of a strong baseline you’re not rebuilding from scratch each time. The hours your team would have spent fighting per-client setup go straight back into the business.
MSPs who put Okta in front of Microsoft also cut:
Server costs – by migrating customers off on-premises infrastructure like Active Directory
Shared admin accounts – and their associated security risks and administrative overhead
ZeroTek: Okta’s MSP Partner
While MSPs are often attracted to Okta’s superior technology, Okta’s procurement process and technical support are tailored to meet the needs of enterprise customers. That’s why Okta routinely refers MSPs to ZeroTek.
As Okta’s distribution partner for MSPs, ZeroTek offers:
MSP-exclusive month-to-month Okta licensing and consumption-based billing to support the scalability and cost control that MSPs and their SMB customers need.
The ability to create new Okta Orgs from ZeroTek in seconds, without any contract or sales process, for customers of any size, and manage them all from a secure single dashboard.
MSP-centric technical support from Okta-certified experts.
MSP-centric features like help desk caller verification and role-based access control for granular technician access management to customer Okta Orgs.
In these ways and more, ZeroTek makes it easy for MSPs to upgrade to Okta and deliver the benefits of this world-class, enterprise-level IAM technology to their SMB customers.
Okta and ZeroTek ... and Microsoft?
Despite the many significant benefits for MSPs who use ZeroTek to deliver Okta, some MSPs will not be ready to give up Microsoft and Conditional Access just yet.
Because Okta interoperates so well with Microsoft, MSPs don’t have to embrace Okta the way US federal agencies, FedEx, or Zoom have.
As an interim step, MSPs can leverage Okta to create a unified identity platform that simplifies Microsoft provisioning, supports cloud app adoption, reduces reliance on on-prem software, and centralizes policy management. This combination also streamlines your IT operations by automating manual tasks and increasing efficiency.
ZeroTek can help
Microsoft Entra ID and Okta both offer compelling IAM solutions. Whether you’re considering Okta, or a combination of both Microsoft and Okta, we can help you understand how Okta delivered through ZeroTek can secure and streamline your digital identity management. Book a call with us to explore how the ZeroTek | Okta solution can help your business succeed.
Feature
Okta for MSPs from ZeroTek
Microsoft
Scalability
Easy for MSPs to standardize across customers.
Cloud-based and vendor-neutral, with 7700+ pre-built SSO app connectors, with most integrations taking under an hour.
Automated provisioning/deprovisioning (LCM) across 800+ apps.
Exceptional, timely, MSP-centric Okta support from ZeroTek. We want you to succeed!
Exclusive, field-tested MSP best practices for deploying Okta successfully to customers of any size with ZeroTek.
Difficult for MSPs to standardize across customers.
1400+ pre-built SSO app connectors and variable compatibility with non-Microsoft apps.
Automated provisioning for just over 360 apps — less than half of Okta’s.
Challenging configuration and underwhelming tech support.
Build your own MSP best practices for deploying across customers of different sizes.
Cost
Cost transparency and monthly, consumption-based billing.
Month-to-month licensing with no annual contract, no inventory, and no renewals to manage.
Step-up security capability added à la carte, only where clients need it.
An identity layer you deliver, price, and control yourself.
Opportunity to eliminate costs of on-premises infrastructure like Active Directory.
Hidden costs like license upgrades, infrastructure, deployment, maintenance, and integration time.
Step-up security (P2/E5) pushed across the estate on annual commitment; month-to-month carries a ~20% premium.
Yearly per-customer renewals.
Security
Policy changes apply immediately and uniformly across every integrated app.
Activity logs are current and comprehensive across customers and technicians for accurate, efficient troubleshooting.
Conditional Access policy and group-membership changes can take up to a day to fully propagate to resource providers (per CAE’s own Microsoft documentation); forcing immediate effect requires manual per-user token/session revocation.
Near-real-time revocation via CAE is limited to Microsoft’s own CAE-aware workloads.
Activity log update lag of up to 24 hours.
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