On this page

What is Okta

Okta is a customizable, secure, and drop-in solution to add authentication and authorization services to your applications. Get scalable authentication built right into your application without the development overhead, security risks, and maintenance that come from building it yourself.

You can connect any application in any language or on any stack to Okta and define how you want your users to sign in. Each time a user tries to authenticate, Okta will verify their identity and send the required information back to your app.

Use our SDKs or API to connect your apps, add users, configure rules, customize your sign-in page, and then monitor your services from our built-in reports.

What you can do with Okta

Take a look at just a few of Okta's use cases:

You built an app, and you want to add authentication and authorization

You can use Okta to allow your users to sign in with a username/password or with their social accounts, such as Google or Facebook using pre-built sign-in components from Okta. After the user has signed in, you can retrieve their user profile to customize the UI based on their role and apply your authorization policies.

You built an API, and you want to add authentication and authorization to it

You can use Okta to secure your APIs and application backends so that only authorized users and applications can call them. Define scopes, claims, and configure policies to determine who can have access to your API resources.

You have more than one app, and you want to implement Single Sign-On (SSO)

Use Okta to allow your users to sign in to other applications instead of requiring them to remember separate sets of credentials for each application or service. Users can simply sign in once and access your full suite of applications.

You want to enforce multifactor authentication (MFA) when your users want to access sensitive data

Use Okta to enable a second level of security (SMS, Email, Voice, Biometrics, Okta Verify, and so on) for every sign in or configure policies to only enforce MFA based on location or network.

You want to federate your users using an existing enterprise directory

Use Okta to allow users to sign in to the various internal and third-party applications using their existing enterprise credentials or through Active Directory (AD) or LDAP servers.

You have an app, and you want to manage the users that access your application

Use Okta's UI to add or remove users, modify profile and authorization attributes, and to quickly troubleshoot user sign-in issues. Okta gives you one place to manage your users and user data. Users can be synced from a variety of services, third party apps, and user stores.