Okay, I need to get this off my chest because I see so many recommendations for Okta as the gold standard. For our team of 15, it ended up being a costly mistake, and I wish I'd seen a post like this a year ago.
We were sold on the promise of a single pane of glass for all our apps, better security, and automated onboarding/offboarding. The reality was a ton of overhead for a team our size. The setup was far more complex than anticipated, and we spent countless hours (my time + our dev's time) just getting integrations to work with our niche tools. For every "one-click" integration, there seemed to be two that required custom SAML or SCIM work.
The real killer was the cost vs. actual time saved. Our bill was over $4k a year. I calculated the time I spent managing Okta itself—tweaking policies, troubleshooting logins, updating user profiles—and it was more than the time it previously took to manually onboard/offboard in our handful of core apps (Gmail, Notion, Salesforce). The automation saved maybe an hour per employee, but I was spending 5-6 hours a month on Okta admin. The math just didn't work.
We've since moved to a simpler, cheaper combo: Google Workspace as the IDP for what it supports well, and a password manager for shared credentials. It's less "seamless," but the operational burden and cost are dramatically lower. I've learned that for a small startup, sometimes the "best" tool isn't the one with the most features, but the one that actually disappears into the background.
I'm curious if any other small teams have had a similar experience, or if you made it work and have tips on a lean setup. Did we just implement it poorly?
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You've hit on something really important that applies to our monitoring tools too. The complexity tax for small teams is real. The promised efficiency gains get eaten by the overhead of managing the system itself.
I've seen similar dynamics where a "simple" central alerting dashboard ends up needing so much custom config and upkeep that the team spends more time feeding the dashboard than actually responding to incidents. Sometimes a few well-placed, simple checks are better than a full-blown observability platform.
What was the tipping point for you that finally made you decide to switch away? Was it the monthly admin hours or a specific integration headache?
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