The hidden costs of open source SSO: Why enterprise readiness requires more than free code

Single Sign-On (SSO) is the most sensitive part of your infrastructure. It’s the system that decides who gets in, what they can touch, and how securely they do it — the front door to your organization’s data, customers, and reputation.

Open-source SSO projects like Keycloak, Gluu, or Authelia promise freedom, transparency, and control. They’re flexible, auditable, and, at first glance, free. But as companies grow and start selling into enterprise accounts, that freedom comes with a hidden price tag: you inherit every operational, security, and compliance burden yourself.

Open source gives you the keys.

What most teams don’t realize is: you’re now driving the car, maintaining the engine, and insuring it too.

The allure of open source: Transparency and control

There’s a reason developers love open source SSO: you can see the code, tweak the flows, and integrate it directly into your stack. No opaque black boxes. No vendor lock-in.

For a startup, that’s empowering. You ship faster, customize easily, and avoid procurement overhead.

But as soon as your first enterprise customer asks about SAML support, audit logging, or SOC 2 compliance, reality sets in. Transparency doesn’t equal reliability. Flexibility doesn’t equal scale.

And suddenly, you’re not just using software anymore: you are the vendor.

The maintenance trap: When “free” isn’t free

That shiny open-source SSO instance? It’s not a side project. It’s a mission-critical identity platform that your team must now build, secure, and operate forever.

Let’s break down what that really means.

1. Hosting and scaling: You are the cloud provider now

Deploying an open-source SSO server means you own uptime.

You’re managing clusters, load balancers, and session caches; monitoring Redis and Postgres; troubleshooting latency spikes across regions.

If an identity node dies at 2:47 a.m., there’s no one to call, just your own engineers, sifting through logs while authentication grinds to a halt.

Each new tenant, directory, or integration adds complexity: sticky sessions, token refreshes, clock drift. Your login flow becomes part of your critical path, and your product is only as reliable as your SSO.

You are not an app team anymore: you are the identity ops team.

2. Security patching: A race against zero-days

In an enterprise environment, a single unpatched dependency can mean breach risk.

When a new CVE hits (say, a vulnerability in Keycloak’s underlying WildFly or Tomcat server) you have to:

1. Identify exposure.
2. Patch or rebuild your Docker image.
3. Regression-test your environment.
4. Deploy to production immediately.

Attackers scan continuously for outdated identity systems. A delay of even a few hours can mean exposure. Your authentication layer, the literal front door to your product, is now a potential attack surface.

There’s no automatic security pipeline or vendor alert. Open source doesn’t come with SLAs or emergency hotfixes. You are the patch management team, the security engineer, and the risk owner, all at once.

3. Integration complexity: You don’t just “add SAML”

Enterprise identity standards like SAML, OIDC, and SCIM are anything but standardized. Each provider has quirks:

• Okta demands custom-signed assertions.
• Azure AD requires proprietary NameID formats.
• PingFederate refuses XML with missing namespaces.

Supporting one IdP might take a day. Supporting ten? That’s a month of engineering and QA. You’ll manage certificate rotation, SP metadata, JIT provisioning, and cross-tenant configs, all with the risk that one wrong config can lock out thousands of users.

What started as “add SAML support” turns into a full-time engineering function. Congratulations: you’re now the IdP, just without the dedicated team.

4. Compliance and risk: You’re now the vendor of record

If you’re selling to enterprises, you’re expected to meet compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR. That means encryption policies, audit logs, and incident response processes, not just code that works.

Self-hosting SSO puts all that on your plate. You must prove your deployment is secure, patched, and monitored. You’ll be asked to provide evidence, architecture diagrams, and logs. And if a breach occurs, you can’t point to a vendor, you are the vendor.

This alone is enough to stall enterprise deals in procurement.

5. The operational reality

Identity infrastructure doesn’t just fail; it degrades.

Token refresh loops. Session invalidations. Stale caches. Expired certificates. The invisible gremlins of authentication that make debugging a nightmare.

These aren’t theoretical. They’re daily problems that large enterprises spend entire teams solving.

So when you choose open-source SSO, you’re not just saving license fees, you’re signing up to rebuild an IdP’s reliability, one bug at a time.

The bottom line is that open source SSO isn’t “free.” It’s a commitment to infrastructure, security, and compliance that never stops evolving.

For teams chasing enterprise customers, the true cost isn’t the server bill, it’s the operational risk of owning one of the most sensitive systems in your stack.

When that 3 a.m. PagerDuty alert hits, “free” starts to feel very expensive...

The scalability wall

As your customer base grows, authentication scales exponentially in complexity. Every new user directory, external IdP, and regional compliance rule adds to the entropy.

Open source tools rarely include the invisible plumbing that enterprise authentication needs: load balancing, cross-region failover, rate limiting, and tenant isolation.

What begins as “let’s host our own Keycloak” often ends as “we’re building an identity platform from scratch.”

And the real cost isn’t AWS bills, it’s engineering focus. Every hour your team spends fighting identity fires is an hour not spent on your actual product.

The vendor reality: SLAs, support, and peace of mind

When a zero-day exploit is disclosed or an integration fails at scale, open source maintainers don’t owe you a fix, and definitely not a 30-minute SLA.

Enterprise vendors do.

Reliability, compliance, and 24/7 support aren’t nice-to-haves; they’re procurement checkboxes. Without them, enterprise deals stall or vanish.

A commercial-grade identity platform doesn’t just provide authentication; it provides assurance. The kind that helps you pass security reviews, win deals, and sleep through the night.

The takeaway: Open source is sometimes a great start, but never a finish line

Open source SSO is fantastic for learning and prototyping. It’s not a sustainable path to enterprise readiness.

It doesn’t give you uptime guarantees, compliance audits, or a team watching your back when a zero-day drops.

At scale, freedom becomes friction. Transparency becomes toil. And all the risk (operational, security, and contractual) consolidates in one place: you.

Open source SSO gets you from zero to one. Enterprise-grade platforms get you from one to IPO.

How WorkOS bridges the gap

WorkOS was built to solve this exact problem: helping developers deliver enterprise-grade authentication without the overhead of building and maintaining it in-house.

WorkOS provides a developer-friendly platform that abstracts away the complexity of enterprise identity while embracing open standards like SAML, SCIM, and OIDC. With WorkOS, teams get:

• Pre-built integrations with enterprise identity providers (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, and more)
• Out-of-the-box compliance with SOC 2 Type II and GDPR
• Robust SLAs and 24/7 monitoring
• Powerful developer tooling: modern SDKs, APIs, and clear documentation

In short: WorkOS lets your product speak the language of the enterprise, without forcing your team to become identity experts.

Open source gets you started. WorkOS gets you to market, and keeps you enterprise ready.

Sign up for WorkOS today and get up to 1 million monthly active users for free.