Promptfoo vs. WorkOS: Security Testing Meets Enterprise Authentication

How do you verify that your AI agent won't leak sensitive data through prompt injection? Can you guarantee it won't escalate privileges beyond its intended scope? These aren't hypothetical risks—they're active threats that security teams need to address systematically.

But here's where positioning matters. Promptfoo is fundamentally a testing tool—it probes, validates, and identifies vulnerabilities in your AI agent's security controls.

WorkOS, by contrast, is authentication infrastructure—it provides the actual identity management, SSO, and access control mechanisms that your agents rely on. Understanding this distinction is critical: Promptfoo tests what WorkOS implements. They're not competitors; they're complementary pieces of a complete security strategy.

What Promptfoo Offers

Promptfoo positions itself as an adversarial testing platform purpose-built for AI applications. At its core, the platform generates and executes thousands of adversarial probes designed to exploit agent-specific vulnerabilities.

The testing methodology operates at three distinct layers. Black-box testing simulates external attackers with no knowledge of your system's internals. Component-level testing validates individual modules within your agent architecture—the LLM itself, retrieval systems, tool-calling logic, and guardrails.

Trace-based testing leverages OpenTelemetry instrumentation to analyze actual runtime behavior, identifying vulnerabilities that only manifest in production-like conditions.

The vulnerability coverage targets threats unique to agentic systems. Promptfoo's probe library includes tests for privilege escalation (can the agent access resources beyond its authorization?), memory poisoning (can malicious input corrupt the agent's context window?), goal hijacking (can an attacker redirect the agent's objectives?), and classic injection attacks adapted for LLM contexts.

The platform maintains specialized plugins for RBAC bypass, broken object-level authorization (BOLA), broken function-level authorization (BFLA), SSRF, SQL injection, and prompt injection variants.

What distinguishes Promptfoo from generic penetration testing tools is dynamic attack generation. Rather than running static test suites, the platform analyzes your specific application to generate targeted attacks. This means the probes adapt to your agent's actual functionality, APIs, and data flows—testing the vulnerabilities that actually exist in your implementation, not just generic OWASP checklists.

The developer experience centers on a local-first CLI that integrates into existing workflows. Security teams can run red-teaming evaluations locally without sending proprietary code or data to external servers.

For organizations that prefer managed infrastructure, Promptfoo offers optional cloud deployment with team collaboration features. CI/CD integration supports GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines, enabling automated security validation on every commit.

Compliance reporting maps findings to established frameworks: OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, NIST Risk Management Framework, MITRE ATLAS, and EU AI Act requirements. This translation layer helps security teams communicate findings to compliance officers and auditors in familiar terminology.

Key Features and Capabilities

Promptfoo's open-source foundation—with over 8,800 GitHub stars and adoption by more than 200,000 developers—has created a robust ecosystem of community-contributed plugins and testing strategies. The platform supports all major LLM providers, from OpenAI and Anthropic to open-source models running on-premise.

The red-teaming engine executes adversarial probes at scale. The free tier includes 10,000 probes per month, sufficient for continuous testing during active development. Enterprise deployments can scale to hundreds of thousands of probes, enabling comprehensive coverage across large agent fleets.

Agent-specific vulnerability testing addresses threats that don't exist in traditional software. Privilege escalation tests verify that agents can't access data or execute actions beyond their intended scope. Memory poisoning tests inject malicious content into the agent's context window to verify isolation between user sessions. Goal hijacking tests attempt to redirect the agent's objectives through carefully crafted prompts.

The three-layered testing approach provides complementary coverage. Black-box tests simulate external attackers with no internal knowledge. Component-level tests validate individual modules in isolation. Trace-based tests analyze actual runtime behavior through OpenTelemetry instrumentation, catching vulnerabilities that only manifest in production conditions.

CI/CD integration brings security testing into the development pipeline. Automated red-teaming runs on every commit, catching regressions before they reach production. Failed security checks can block deployments, enforcing minimum security standards.

Pricing and Plans

Promptfoo offers three deployment tiers designed for different organizational scales and requirements.

The Community tier is free forever and includes unlimited evaluation features, 10,000 red-teaming probes per month, and support for local or self-hosted deployment. This tier targets individual developers and small teams building AI applications without enterprise collaboration requirements.

The Enterprise tier provides custom probe limits, team collaboration features, SSO integration, and managed cloud infrastructure. Pricing is customized based on scale and requirements.

The Enterprise On-Premise tier includes all Enterprise features plus on-premise deployment for organizations with data residency requirements or compliance mandates that prohibit cloud-based testing. This tier appeals to financial services, healthcare, and government organizations.

Notably, 44 Fortune 500 companies use Promptfoo, indicating enterprise adoption at scale. The $23.7 million in total funding—including an $18.4 million Series A from Insight Partners and a16z—provides financial runway for continued development.

Promptfoo vs WorkOS: Testing Tools vs Authentication Infrastructure

Here's the critical distinction that security teams need to understand: Promptfoo and WorkOS operate in fundamentally different layers of your security architecture. Promptfoo validates that your security controls work correctly; WorkOS provides those security controls.

Promptfoo is a security testing platform. It generates adversarial probes to identify vulnerabilities in your AI agent's security posture. It tests for prompt injection, privilege escalation, data leakage, and goal hijacking. It validates that your access controls, input sanitization, and guardrails function correctly under adversarial conditions. It produces compliance reports that document your security validation efforts.

WorkOS is authentication infrastructure. It provides the actual SSO integrations, multi-factor authentication, directory sync, and fine-grained authorization controls that your AI agents rely on for identity management. When your agent needs to verify a user's identity, check their permissions, or enforce organizational access policies, WorkOS provides the runtime infrastructure that makes those decisions.

These are complementary tools, not alternatives. A robust agentic security strategy needs both.

Consider a concrete scenario: You've built an AI agent that accesses customer data based on user roles. WorkOS provides the SSO integration that authenticates users, the directory sync that imports their role assignments, and the authorization APIs that enforce access controls. Promptfoo tests that implementation by attempting to bypass those controls through prompt injection, role manipulation, and privilege escalation attacks.

Promptfoo validates; WorkOS implements. Promptfoo identifies vulnerabilities; WorkOS prevents unauthorized access. Promptfoo generates compliance reports; WorkOS provides audit logs of actual access decisions.

Organizations building secure agentic systems typically need both. WorkOS handles the foundational authentication and authorization infrastructure. Promptfoo validates that the security controls built on that foundation actually work under adversarial conditions.

The choice isn't Promptfoo or WorkOS—it's recognizing where each tool fits in your security architecture. If you're asking "how do I authenticate users and enforce access controls in my AI agent?", you need authentication infrastructure like WorkOS. If you're asking "how do I verify that my security controls can't be bypassed through prompt injection?", you need security testing like Promptfoo.

Why WorkOS Is the Proven Choice for Enterprise Authentication

When your AI agents need to make access control decisions in production, testing tools can't help you. You need production-grade authentication infrastructure that handles the actual identity verification, authorization enforcement, and audit logging that enterprise deployments require.

WorkOS provides the complete authentication stack that modern AI agents require. Enterprise SSO integrations work out of the box—SAML, OIDC, and OAuth 2.0 connections to every major identity provider. Your customers' IT teams can configure SSO through Admin Portal without engineering involvement, eliminating the integration bottleneck that traditionally delays enterprise sales.

Multi-factor authentication enforcement happens at the infrastructure layer, before your agent processes any requests. Directory sync keeps user roles and permissions synchronized with your customers' identity systems, ensuring that access controls reflect current organizational structure. When employees leave or change roles, those permission updates propagate to your agent automatically.

Fine-grained authorization through FGA (Fine-Grained Authorization) enables role-based access control at the feature level. You can enforce that certain agent capabilities—accessing sensitive data, executing privileged actions, modifying configurations—require specific roles or permissions. These checks happen at the API level, not in prompt logic that attackers can manipulate.

Audit logging provides complete visibility into authentication events and access decisions. When security teams investigate potential breaches or compliance auditors request access reports, WorkOS maintains immutable logs of every authentication attempt, authorization check, and session event. This audit trail is essential for SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance.

The developer experience focuses on speed to production. WorkOS maintains pre-built integrations for all major identity providers. SDKs for Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and PHP provide idiomatic APIs that integrate into existing application code. Comprehensive documentation and example applications eliminate the research phase that typically precedes authentication implementations.

Enterprise customers expect authentication infrastructure that meets their security standards—not home-grown solutions or generic auth libraries. WorkOS provides that production-grade infrastructure so your engineering team can focus on agent capabilities rather than identity plumbing.

For organizations building AI agents that handle sensitive data or execute privileged actions, authentication isn't a feature—it's foundational infrastructure. WorkOS provides that foundation with the reliability, security, and compliance that enterprise deployments demand.

Final Thoughts

The agentic security landscape requires multiple layers of defense, and understanding where different tools fit in that architecture is essential for building secure systems.

Promptfoo serves a critical role: validating that your security controls actually work under adversarial conditions. Its automated red-teaming capabilities, agent-specific vulnerability tests, and dynamic attack generation provide assurance that your AI agents can withstand real-world attacks. For security teams tasked with validating LLM applications before production deployment, Promptfoo offers purpose-built tooling that traditional penetration testing approaches can't match.

But testing tools validate implementations—they don't provide the runtime infrastructure that actually enforces security policies. When your AI agent needs to authenticate users, enforce access controls, synchronize directory permissions, and maintain audit logs, you need production-grade authentication infrastructure.

WorkOS fills that role. It provides the identity verification, authorization enforcement, and compliance capabilities that AI agents require to operate securely in enterprise environments. While Promptfoo can validate that your access controls resist bypass attempts, WorkOS provides the actual access control decisions that protect your data in production.

Organizations building enterprise AI agents typically need both: WorkOS for the authentication infrastructure that agents rely on, and Promptfoo for the security validation that proves those controls work correctly. Understanding this complementary relationship—rather than viewing them as alternatives—leads to better security architecture decisions.

If you're building AI agents that handle sensitive data, serve enterprise customers, or need to meet compliance requirements, start with WorkOS for your authentication foundation. Then use tools like Promptfoo to validate that implementation. Testing without infrastructure leaves you vulnerable; infrastructure without testing leaves you uncertain.

Choose both—because comprehensive security requires complete coverage across validation and implementation layers.