Okta vs Microsoft Entra ID: what you already pay for decides most of it

Most companies weighing Okta against Microsoft Entra ID already own one of them, and many own both. Before comparing features, find out which Entra licence your Microsoft 365 plan already includes and how many of your apps live outside Microsoft. Those two answers settle most of the decision.

This question tends to come up at renewal time. Okta is turning off some Classic Engine features, so orgs that never upgraded to Identity EnginedefinitionOkta's current platform. Older orgs still run Classic Engine and need to upgrade before Okta turns some Classic features off. have that work coming anyway. Microsoft keeps putting more of Entra into the bundles people already buy, and finance notices when it pays twice for sign-in. Both vendors also sell identity for AI agents now, which drags the choice into AI projects as well.

Get it wrong and the cost shows up slowly. You pay for two platforms for years, or you move and find the apps nobody listed, the service accounts that still use passwords, and the Windows devices whose sign-in depended on the old setup. A sign-in outage stops the whole company, so the cutover has to be planned like any other production change.

Engineers will want the protocol detail, and that comes later. The business call rests on the first two steps. If Microsoft 365 is your center and most apps already sign in through Entra, Okta has to earn its place. If you run a mixed estate with Google Workspace, AWS and hundreds of SaaS tools, Okta's neutrality starts to pay for itself.

The table goes by each vendor's public pricing and documentation as of late October 2026. Both change their packaging often, so check the line items against your own quote.

Entra wins on cost when you already own it. If your Microsoft 365 plan includes P1, you've paid for SSO, MFA and Conditional AccessdefinitionEntra's policy engine. It decides whether to allow a sign-in, ask for MFA or block it, based on the user, app, location and device. It needs Entra ID P1.. Adding Okta means a second bill for the same job. Conditional Access also sees what Intune knows about a device, so a policy like "only compliant laptops reach payroll" lives in one place.

Okta wins on reach and neutrality. Its catalogue is big, and the console handles a Google Workspace app the same way it handles Microsoft 365. Okta calls itself an "independent and neutral" identity platform. That's marketing, but there's something in it. If you leave Microsoft 365 one day, your sign-in doesn't have to move with it.

The catch with Entra is that the cheap tier rarely stays cheap. Risk-based policies need P2, and access reviews, Lifecycle Workflows and entitlement management need ID Governance. Agent protections need Agent 365. Price the tier you'll actually run, which may be above what came in the box.

The catch with Okta is that Microsoft 365 still needs Entra underneath. Okta federates the Microsoft 365 domain over WS-FederationdefinitionA trust where one system accepts another's sign-in. When Microsoft 365 is federated to Okta, Okta checks the password and MFA, and Entra accepts the result., and Entra keeps the user objects, licences and device records. So you run two identity systems either way. Someone has to keep MFA rules, device trust and sign-in policy consistent between them.

Uptime won't split them. Okta's trust site shows 99.99% availability over 12 months, averaged across incidents that hit at least a tenth of customers. Microsoft promises 99.99% for authentication and has published 99.999% for every month so far this year, as an all-tenant total. The two figures aren't measured the same way. Either way, sign-in is a single point of failure, so plan break-glass accounts on whichever one you pick.

Plenty of companies keep Okta for sign-in and let Entra carry Microsoft 365 underneath. That works, but most of the trouble sits in the seam between the two, and neither vendor's sales pitch covers it. These come from Microsoft's and Okta's own docs and known-issue pages.

• MFA trust. A Graph setting called federatedIdpMfaBehavior decides whether Entra accepts the MFA Okta did, and if neither it nor the older SupportsMfa setting was set, Entra accepts it. Okta's docs say to use enforceMfaByFederatedIdp. Microsoft says you can't switch back to SupportsMfa afterwards.
• Windows sign-in loops. Okta's own FAQ says Windows 10 users can get stuck in an endless sign-in loop when Okta MFA stands in for Entra MFA. Windows Hello for Business enrollment can loop too. Okta's fix there is to let users pick any two factor types in the Office 365 sign-on policy.
• Hybrid join needs a legacy door left open. Hybrid-joined devices authenticate over WS-Trust, and Okta only supports that through its legacy endpoint settings. Okta treats a password typed at the Windows login screen as legacy authentication, so a policy that blocks legacy auth blocks it.
• Old mail clients. Okta says Exchange ActiveSync and other legacy clients only get password sign-in through its Office 365 app, with no MFA.
• Admin and service accounts. Federation covers a whole domain. Okta tells you to keep Microsoft 365 admin accounts off the federated domain so you can't lock yourself out. Okta's answer for a service account that mustn't be sent to Okta is to put it on a domain that isn't federated.
• Device compliance. Entra Conditional Access gets Intune's compliance result directly. One way Okta checks that an Intune-managed Windows device is managed is through certificates Okta issues and Intune deploys. Okta as the CA can't renew them, so you push the profile again before they expire.
• Signing certificates. Okta warns that Office 365 WS-Federation integrations created before its 2026.08.0 release use org-level signing certificates, many of which expire in early 2027. They have to move to app-level certificates before then, so check yours while it can go in a normal change window.

List prices make Okta Starter look cheaper than Entra P1, by a dollar. That comparison almost never decides anything. Microsoft bundles P1 into Microsoft 365 E3 and Business Premium, and P2 into E5. If your plan already includes P1 or P2, the real comparison is Okta's full price against no extra Entra spend, plus any Entra tier you'd need on top.

• Okta: the suite. Starter makes you buy Adaptive MFA and Lifecycle Management as add-ons. Essentials gives you Privileged Access for two admins. Device Access and Identity Threat Protection only come bundled in Professional, which has no list price, so ask for that quote early.
• Okta: governance. Access Governance comes with Essentials and up, and Okta's table doesn't offer it on Starter or Core Essentials. If governance matters, that alone can set your minimum suite.
• Entra: the gap between what's bundled and what you'll use. Risk-based policies need P2. P2 also covers basic access reviews, but the full governance set, Lifecycle Workflows included, needs ID Governance for every member user in scope.
• Entra: if you want governance and Microsoft's network access products together, Entra Suite lists at $12 per user per month, and you still pay for P1 underneath.
• Both: AI agents. If you plan to put agents under the IdP, budget for it separately. Okta for AI Agents is its own subscription, and Entra's agent protections need Agent 365.
• Both: the people cost of running two IdPs side by side, which is the bill most budgets leave out.

Microsoft publishes a four-part guide for moving from Okta to Entra: federation, sync provisioning, sign-on policies and applications. Read in order, it's a fair map of where moves go wrong, and most of it applies in reverse if you're consolidating onto Okta.

Two things in Microsoft's guide catch people out. Hybrid joindefinitionA Windows device joined to on-premises Active Directory and registered in Entra ID at the same time, so it can use both. keeps sending Windows devices to Okta until the domain is defederated, so device sign-in breaks if Okta goes away first. Hybrid join also doesn't work with the cloud sync agents, so if you rely on it, you need a full Entra Connect server. The guide also warns that staged rolloutdefinitionAn Entra feature that moves selected groups to cloud sign-in while the domain stays federated. It's for testing a move, and Microsoft says it isn't meant to stay on permanently. doesn't cover legacy mail protocols such as POP3 and SMTP, so a pilot won't test them.

# Which domains are federated (Okta) and which are managed (Entra)?
$ Get-MgDomain | Select Id, AuthenticationType
# example output
contoso.com          Federated
contoso.onmicrosoft.com  Managed

Going the other way, onto Okta, is mostly app work plus one decision about MFA. Okta federates the Microsoft 365 domain, and its docs show how Okta MFA can satisfy Entra's MFA requirement. Okta can also act as an External MFA provider inside Entra, and Microsoft counts External MFA toward its Azure MFA enforcement. Microsoft doesn't currently allow External MFA in authentication strength policies, so check any policy that demands phishing-resistant methods.

We work on both platforms, so we don't have a stake in which one you keep. We start by matching your licences and app list against what each platform would cost to run, then plan and run the move or the Identity Engine upgrade in waves you can roll back. See our Okta and Microsoft Entra ID pages, hire Okta engineers, or start with a free assessment.