SCIM: The hidden growth engine behind tools like Slack and Figma

Most people think of growth in terms of UX, pricing, or viral loops. But some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies have tapped into a quieter, more powerful lever: identity infrastructure.

Enter SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management)—a protocol most often associated with IT compliance and enterprise checklists. But look closer, and you’ll see that tools like Slack, Notion, and Figma have used SCIM to fuel product adoption, drive expansion, and increase stickiness—often by making it available earlier in their pricing tiers than you’d expect.

This article explores how SCIM, when treated not just as a backend integration but as a go-to-market tool, can accelerate growth and unlock scale—especially for productivity and collaboration tools targeting fast-moving teams.

What is SCIM?

SCIM (pronounced “skim”) is an open standard that makes it easier to manage user identities across different systems and apps. Basically, it’s a way to automatically handle things like creating, updating, and deleting user accounts in multiple places without needing to do it manually every time. SCIM lets IT teams ensure that the right people have access to the right tools, with the right permissions.

When someone joins a company, SCIM can instantly create their account in apps like Notion or Slack. When someone leaves, it can remove their access and free up a license. When someone’s role changes their permissions are automatically updated.

This automation isn’t just about security and compliance—it also streamlines onboarding, reduces support overhead, and enables frictionless scale.

Imagine this: You're a sales leader at Figma, and you're close to signing a deal with Shopify. Shopify employs thousands of designers, developers, and marketers who all need access to different parts of Figma to collaborate effectively.

Without SCIM, Shopify’s IT team would have to:

• Manually create Figma accounts for each user—possibly hundreds or thousands across different departments.
• Assign roles manually.
• Keep track of who’s switching teams.
• Deactivate accounts one by one when people leave.

With SCIM, all of that is automated. As soon as a Shopify employee is added to the right group in their identity provider (like Okta), they’re instantly provisioned into Figma with the correct access. And when they leave, they’re automatically removed. It’s fast, secure, and scalable.

This kind of seamless identity integration is a huge win for both sides: the customer saves time and reduces risk, and the SaaS product sees faster adoption, smoother onboarding, and stickier usage.

That’s why more companies are realizing SCIM isn’t just a backend protocol—it’s a growth strategy in disguise.

SCIM as an expansion catalyst

In SaaS, the moment of truth often isn’t when a team signs up—it’s what happens after.

Can they onboard their teammates quickly?

Can they scale without bottlenecks?

Can they grow usage across departments without IT becoming the roadblock?

That’s where SCIM quietly becomes a hero.

Provisioning users might sound like an ops problem, but it’s actually a growth moment in disguise. The easier it is to add people to your product, the more likely a tool will spread organically across an organization. SCIM makes that happen by automating what used to be a manual, error-prone process—instantly creating accounts, assigning permissions, and syncing access across teams as they evolve.

Take Slack as an example. Onboarding new hires into channels, assigning them to the right workspace, and removing access when people leave—all of that is handled behind the scenes with SCIM. And Slack doesn’t just reserve this for its top-tier customers—it includes SCIM support in its Business+ plan, giving growing teams the ability to scale usage without security gaps or IT headaches.

It’s a classic SaaS flywheel:

• Lower the friction to grow usage.
• Deliver a seamless onboarding experience.
• Expand footprint across the org.
• Increase retention and stickiness.

Without SCIM, expansion feels like dragging a boulder uphill. With SCIM, it feels like rolling downhill—smooth, fast, and inevitable.

Security builds confidence—and confidence drives growth

Security used to be seen as a blocker—something that slowed down sales cycles, added friction, and got in the way of product adoption. But in today’s SaaS landscape, security is a differentiator. It’s one of the fastest ways to earn trust and clear a path to growth.

For IT leaders and procurement teams, security features like SCIM and SSO aren’t just technical checkboxes—they’re shorthand for maturity. When companies see those features available (especially at mid-tier pricing), they think: this is a product we can deploy now and scale with later.

‍That’s why leading tools like Notion offer SCIM and SSO in their Business plan—not just in their highest enterprise tier. This approach gives growing teams what they need to scale securely, without jumping through hoops or hitting paywalls. It removes objections, accelerates deployment, and earns long-term trust.

In today’s market, buyers aren’t just evaluating features—they’re evaluating risk. If your product feels like a liability, it won’t get past procurement. But if it checks the right boxes up front, it becomes the obvious choice.

SCIM may start as an infrastructure feature—but its real impact is strategic: it builds confidence, and confidence closes deals.

SCIM cuts costs and drives stickiness

SCIM isn’t just a backend convenience—it’s a strategic lever for reducing costs and keeping your product deeply integrated into customer workflows.

Manual provisioning burns time and budget. IT teams juggling spreadsheets and email threads to manage user access aren’t just bogged down—they’re exposed to configuration errors, compliance lapses, and bloated license counts from orphaned accounts.

SCIM eliminates that overhead. By automating user provisioning and deprovisioning, it reduces support load, prevents costly mistakes, and lets IT focus on high-impact initiatives. The result? Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers and higher net revenue retention (NRR) for vendors.

But SCIM’s real power lies in the way it embeds your product into the fabric of an organization.

When your app is SCIM-enabled, it becomes part of the customer’s identity and security stack. That means provisioning flows through their identity provider, access is governed by role or team, and your app stays aligned with how they work. This seamless integration makes it harder to rip out—and easier to scale across the org.

Deprovisioning becomes clean, auditable, and secure. Freed seats are instantly reusable, data is preserved, and account hygiene stays intact. Over time, that operational reliability builds trust—and that trust builds stickiness.

Figma exemplifies this. By investing early in robust SCIM support, they empowered large, distributed design teams to scale usage without friction—turning identity integration into a growth accelerator.

Rethinking SCIM: A growth lever, not a enterprise-only feature

It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating SCIM as an “enterprise-only” perk—something to lock behind your highest pricing tier in hopes of squeezing out more ARR. But the most successful SaaS companies aren’t following that playbook.

They’re flipping it.

By making SCIM available earlier—often in mid-tier or even startup-friendly plans—they're not leaving money on the table. They’re clearing the runway for product-led growth.

When teams can provision users securely from day one, adoption doesn’t stall at the IT bottleneck. Deployment gets faster. Compliance concerns fade. And usage starts to scale organically—especially in larger, more complex orgs.

Just look at Slack, Notion, and Figma. All of them offer SCIM support in plans that are well within reach of fast-growing startups and midmarket teams. The result? Their tools land easily, grow quietly, and become mission-critical before anyone needs to talk to sales.

The alternative—gating SCIM behind your enterprise tier—risks doing the opposite. It turns expansion into friction. It makes IT a blocker. And it raises the odds that a scaling customer starts shopping elsewhere before they ever reach your highest tier.

So don’t treat SCIM like a monetization toggle. Treat it like the growth flywheel accelerator it actually is.

Building SCIM is easier than ever

For teams building B2B SaaS products, there’s no longer an excuse to skip identity infrastructure. SCIM isn’t the months-long engineering lift it used to be. With WorkOS, it’s possible to ship full SCIM support with robust APIs, test harnesses, and admin UIs in a matter of days—not quarters.

That means startups and scale-ups can offer SCIM earlier in their journey, leveling the playing field with incumbents and winning over security-conscious buyers from the start.

WorkOS Directory Sync gives your team a powerful, flexible, and enterprise-grade SCIM implementation out of the box. No need to reinvent the wheel or build brittle logic from scratch.

Instead of diving into the technical weeds of the SCIM protocol and handling each IdP’s unique requirements, you can integrate with all the major directories like Okta, Microsoft Entra, Google Workspace, and any other SCIM-compliant provider with just a single integration.

What you get with WorkOS Directory Sync:

• SDKs for every popular platform and Slack-based support.
• Plug-and-play support for Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, OneLogin, and more.
• While webhooks are also supported, WorkOS’s Events API means every SCIM request is processed in order and in real time. You’ll never miss a provisioning request again.
• WorkOS’s Admin Portal takes the pain out of onboarding your customers’ IT teams and configuring your app to work with their identity provider.
• Unlike competitors who price by monthly active users, WorkOS charges a flat rate for each company you onboard — whether they’re syncing 10 or 10,000 users with your app.

This means startups and scale-ups can offer SCIM right from their early plans—not just to check a box, but to win deals. You can meet the bar for enterprise readiness without needing an enterprise-sized engineering team.

And that matters—because security-minded customers are evaluating identity integration early. They want confidence that your product can scale with their org. With Directory Sync, you can give them that confidence from day one.

WorkOS turns what was once a months-long build into a fast, secure, and reliable integration path. So instead of deferring SCIM, you can deploy it, differentiate with it, and start growing faster.

But don’t take our word for it, check out what our customers have to say about using WorkOS for their SCIM needs and how this has helped them:

• Webflow integrated SCIM on top of SSO to close even larger customers.
• Vercel leveraged WorkOS to land enterprise customers like The Washington Post.
• Tactic accelerated SSO integrations and reduced churn with Directory Sync.
• Netlify replaced their homegrown solution with WorkOS to deliver flexibility to the enterprise.

Final thoughts

The best growth strategies don’t just attract users—they remove the friction that keeps products from spreading naturally across organizations. That’s exactly what SCIM does. While often thought of as backend plumbing, SCIM is quickly becoming a frontline differentiator: it builds trust, accelerates onboarding, and ensures your product scales securely from one team to many.

For SaaS builders, this isn’t just an ops decision—it’s a go-to-market unlock. Products that treat identity infrastructure as part of their growth surface area see faster adoption, cleaner expansion, and fewer blockers on the road to enterprise scale. And with platforms like WorkOS making SCIM implementation radically easier, there’s never been a better time to build it in early—and reap the benefits later.

‍Get started today.