Descope for AI Agent Security: Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

As AI agents evolve from simple chatbots to autonomous systems managing sensitive enterprise data, authentication and identity management have become critical security challenges.

What is Descope?

Descope is a no/low-code external identity and authentication platform. It originally focused on customer IAM (CIAM) and B2B auth, and has since raised a total of $88M in seed funding to expand into “agentic identity” for AI agents and MCP ecosystems.

In April 2025, Descope announced the Agentic Identity Hub, described as an “industry-first platform” to solve authentication and authorization challenges for AI agents, systems, and workflows—including apps that need to become agent-compatible, AI agents that need to connect to external tools, and remote MCP servers that need OAuth-based authorization.

They position the platform at developers building AI and MCP-based systems, and publicly list customers such as Databricks, GoFundMe, Navan, and You.com.

Descope’s traditional auth product is reasonably mature, with SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and CSA STAR certifications/compliance.  The agentic identity components, however, are new as of 2025 and still building their enterprise track record.

Key Features and Capabilities

Descope’s Agentic Identity Hub is structured around four main building blocks: Inbound Apps, Outbound Apps, MCP Auth SDKs, and an Agentic Identity Control Plane.

Inbound vs. Outbound Agent Apps

Descope distinguishes between:

• Inbound Apps – Your app or API acting as an OAuth provider so AI agents can authenticate to you with scoped consent.
• Outbound Apps – Your AI agents using Descope to connect out to third-party tools (Salesforce, Slack, Google Workspace, Snowflake, etc.) via prebuilt OAuth integration templates.

Inbound Apps let your application “become its own IdP” using OAuth, so agents can request specific scopes and users/IT admins see consent screens and can revoke access.

Outbound Apps give you 50+ prebuilt integrations so you don’t have to hand-roll scopes, token storage, or refresh logic for every SaaS tool your agent touches.  This is legitimately useful if your agents need to call a standard basket of SaaS APIs without your team becoming OAuth experts for each one.

Under the hood, both inbound and outbound paths lean on OAuth 2.x authorization code flows with PKCE for public clients. For MCP, Descope explicitly aligns itself with the MCP authorization spec, which standardizes on OAuth 2.1, protected resource metadata, authorization server metadata, and (optionally) Dynamic Client Registration.

So while it’s true OAuth 2.x was originally designed for human-centric flows, using OAuth 2.1 for autonomous agents is not just “experimental”—it’s literally what the MCP spec calls for. The real question isn’t whether OAuth is appropriate; it’s how robustly a given vendor implements the spec and surrounding guardrails.

MCP Auth SDKs & APIs

Descope ships MCP Auth SDKs and APIs specifically for remote MCP servers. The goal is the same category as WorkOS AuthKit, just from a different vendor:

• protect remote MCP servers with OAuth Authorization Code Flow + PKCE
• implement Authorization Server and Protected Resource metadata so MCP clients can discover how to authenticate
• support Dynamic Client Registration so agents can self-register at runtime
• expose scopes, consent screens, and token management patterns developers can wire into their apps

They explicitly pitch this as “secure your remote MCP servers with authorization in three lines of code” for developers who don’t want to implement the OAuth 2.1 machinery themselves.

Agentic Identity Control Plane

In August 2025, Descope extended the Hub with an Agentic Identity Control Plane—policy-based governance, auditing, and lifecycle management for AI agents and MCP clients/servers.

The control plane adds:

• policy guardrails using roles, claims, and scopes
• streaming audit events for consents, agent-app connections, and blocked requests
• lifecycle control over agent identities (registration, consent history, revocation, etc.)

How Descope Handles Agent Authentication

Descope’s architecture treats AI agents and MCP servers as OAuth clients and protected resources.

• Inbound Apps: Your app becomes an OAuth provider. Agents authenticate via OAuth 2.1-compatible flows to call your APIs with delegated scopes.
• Outbound Apps: Your agent becomes the “client,” Descope holds the tokens to external tools, and abstracts away token issuance/refresh/storage.
• MCP Auth: Your remote MCP server uses Descope as the authorization server, relying on OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, server metadata, and dynamic client registration.

For simple cases (one agent, a couple of SaaS tools), you really can wire this up in an afternoon via Descope’s visual flows and SDKs. That’s the genuine strength: quick time-to-demo and DevX.

The trade-offs start to show up in more complex enterprise scenarios:

• large multi-tenant B2B SaaS with multiple customer IdPs and tenant-scoped policies
• deep directory sync and SCIM-driven lifecycle tied to each tenant’s HRIS
• fine-grained authorization read from external policy engines or embedded FGA graphs
• MCP servers spanning multiple clouds or on-prem resources, where you don’t want your external auth vendor also being your entire CIAM pipeline

Descope is actively shipping features in all those directions (SCIM, fine-grained auth, orchestration).  But the agentic pieces are very new. The reality today is: Descope is racing to become a unified external IAM + agentic identity platform; WorkOS is a more narrowly focused, long-running enterprise auth platform with a recently added MCP auth story.

Pricing and Plans

Descope currently offers:

• Free Forever – up to 7,500 MAUs or 50 tenants (with some SAML constraints), including passwordless auth, workflows, basic SSO, RBAC, and more.
• Pro – usage-based MAU pricing (commonly quoted around $0.05–$0.10/user/month in third-party overviews), for apps that have outgrown the free tier.
• Growth / “Starts at $799/mo” – ~25k MAUs, 100 tenants, SCIM, bot protection, multi-region data residency, fine-grained auth, etc.
• Enterprise – custom pricing and configuration for larger orgs, typically where advanced compliance and support SLAs kick in.

Agentic Identity Hub capabilities (Inbound, Outbound, MCP SDKs) are marketed as part of the core platform rather than a separate product line, but it’s clear from their pricing explainers that some advanced features (SCIM, multi-region, FGA, etc.) are gated to Growth/Enterprise tiers.

The key nuance: Descope prices on MAUs and tenants. If you model every AI agent as a separate “user” or if you have lots of machine-to-machine traffic, you need to watch that MAU math carefully—it’s easy to end up in higher tiers quickly.

Descope vs. WorkOS

Descope’s Agentic Identity Hub is a serious attempt to build identity infrastructure for AI agents, apps, and MCP servers. For greenfield AI products where you want one vendor delivering CIAM + B2B auth + agentic identity + MCP auth, Descope is becoming a credible option.

But for B2B SaaS teams, especially those whose revenue depends on enterprise SSO and directory sync, WorkOS still has a much longer and deeper track record.

What Descope Offers

• No/low-code external IAM platform for B2C and B2B apps
• Agentic Identity Hub with Inbound Apps, Outbound Apps, MCP Auth SDKs, and Agentic Identity Control Plane
• 50+ outbound SaaS integrations for AI agents (Gmail, HubSpot, Snowflake, Slack, Notion, Shopify, etc.)
• OAuth 2.1-aligned auth patterns for MCP servers and AI agents
• Full CIAM surface (flows, bot protection, MFA, SCIM, FGA) plus strong compliance posture

The limitation isn’t that Descope is “toy-grade” or missing SOC2/HIPAA; it clearly isn’t. The limitation is that its agentic capabilities are brand-new, whereas the rest of their platform and many of their customers are still primarily in more traditional CIAM/B2B auth scenarios.

Why WorkOS Is the Enterprise-Ready Choice

WorkOS, by contrast, has been built from the start as a developer-first, B2B SaaS auth platform with:

• User Management / AuthKit – up to 1M users free, with MFA, social auth, RBAC and a clean API surface.
• Enterprise SSO – SAML & OIDC with dozens of IdPs, priced per-connection, with self-serve onboarding portals for customer IT.
• Directory Sync (SCIM) – automatic user and group provisioning across major corporate directories, with flat per-directory pricing.
• Audit Logs – structured audit events with streaming and retention controls for SOC 2 / ISO / internal security teams.
• Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA / RBAC) – a Zanzibar-style centralized authorization service for SaaS apps.
• SLA + support – an enterprise SLA targeting 99.99% uptime for covered services (SSO, Directory Sync, Audit Logs) and real support for gnarly SAML/SCIM edge cases.

And critically for this article: WorkOS now ships AuthKit for MCP, which is a spec-compatible OAuth 2.1 authorization server for MCP apps:

• publishes OAuth Authorization Server Metadata and JWKS
• supports OAuth 2.1 with PKCE
• supports OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration for MCP clients
• expects MCP servers to host Protected Resource Metadata and verify tokens
• can run in “bridge” mode, where your existing login system stays in place and WorkOS powers only the MCP OAuth side

That means WorkOS and Descope are actually peers in one very specific area (MCP auth) but WorkOS brings a longer history in enterprise B2B auth and a simpler story if your primary problem is: “I’m a SaaS vendor; I need to integrate with my customers’ IdPs and secure MCP servers and agents at the same time.”

The Right Choice for Most B2B SaaS Teams

For early-stage AI-heavy products where you want a single vendor to cover CIAM, B2B auth, and agentic identity, Descope’s Agentic Identity Hub is worth watching. It has real momentum, smart primitives, and a fast-moving roadmap.

For B2B SaaS teams whose critical path is enterprise deals—SSO, SCIM, audit logs, FGA, and now MCP auth—WorkOS is still the safer, more proven bet:

• It’s built specifically for SaaS vendors, not generic IAM for everything.
• It has a long-lived, production-tested SSO/SCIM/audit stack.
• AuthKit gives you a standards-compliant OAuth 2.1 server for MCP that plugs into your existing user base, not a parallel identity silo.

Descope is aggressively innovating around agentic identity and has a strong core platform. But its agent-specific capabilities are still in their first year of life. WorkOS, by contrast, is bringing MCP and agent auth capabilities onto a platform that’s already been battle-tested across thousands of B2B SaaS deployments.

If you’re building production AI applications that enterprises will trust with sensitive data and mission-critical workflows, you can absolutely experiment with Descope’s Agentic Identity Hub—but WorkOS remains the more established foundation for enterprise authentication and MCP authorization today.