Okta pricing feedback - is it too expensive for a 50-person org?

You're right to be worried. That gut feeling you have about it being overkill for a 50-person shop? Trust it.

Everyone loves to talk about the 'enterprise-grade' security and the shiny integrations, but they never calculate the true cost for a team your size. You're not just buying licenses, you're buying into a whole new layer of admin complexity that someone on your team will have to babysit. The time spent configuring, updating, and troubleshooting policies for 50 people often outweighs the supposed efficiency gains.

Look at what you actually need to accomplish. Is it just SSO for a handful of core apps like Google Workspace and Salesforce? There are simpler, far more cost-effective tools that handle that specific job without the bloat. Okta's value proposition only starts to make sense when you have hundreds of users and a sprawling app portfolio that's genuinely painful to manage manually. At 50 people, you're likely paying a premium for features you'll never enable.

That's a very fair point about the admin overhead being a real part of the cost. It's easy to just look at the per-user license fee and stop there.

I'd push back slightly on the idea that it's always overkill for a 50-person org, though. It really depends on their industry and risk profile. If they're in fintech or healthtech, the security and audit features might be non-negotiable, and the "premium" buys them real compliance value. For a generic marketing agency, your advice is probably spot on.

The key question for the original poster, following your line of thought, is whether they have a specific regulatory or insurance requirement driving them toward an enterprise solution, or if they're just shopping for basic convenience.