How Prefect saved over 300 hours of onboarding time with WorkOS

‍Prefect is a modern workflow orchestration tool that helps data and machine learning engineers build, run, and monitor data pipelines efficiently. With a growing enterprise customer base, they needed to quickly bridge feature gaps around single sign-on (SSO) and user provisioning (SCIM).

Chris Pickett, staff engineer at Prefect, was tasked with finding an auth solution that was secure, compliant, and low-maintenance. After evaluating several solutions that included Auth0, FusionAuth, and open source libraries, Chris and his team chose WorkOS for its exceptional documentation quality and the Admin Portal for self-serve customer onboarding.

Key Takeaways:

• Implementing SSO with WorkOS took less than 1 week.
• The WorkOS Admin Portal has saved over 300 hours of developer time by streamlining the customer onboarding process into a self-serve flow. 
• Compared to Auth0’s python library, the WorkOS version was much more intuitive and straightforward.
• Post-integration maintenance with WorkOS has been minimal, with the last update occurring three months ago.

Polished customer onboarding:

What sold WorkOS was the Admin Portal. Our UI gives customers a link; they go to the Admin Portal, complete onboarding steps at their leisure, and never have to talk to us, making the onboarding process a breeze.

By enabling self-serve setup through the WorkOS Admin Portal, Prefect has eliminated most of the back-and-forth required to onboard new customers. Chris estimates that with the Admin Portal, his team has saved 300 hours for 100+ SSO connections they have provisioned so far. 

If I had to build an Admin Portal like that myself, the research alone would take weeks. Having to get access to all the different IdPs, learn about their quirks, and create a comprehensive tutorial for end users...the amount of time and effort required would be staggering.

Fast integration:

Implementing with WorkOS was just as fast and frictionless. "The actual integration with WorkOS was straightforward," said Chris. "The Python library is extremely well thought out with fantastic documentation. Unlike other libraries from Okta/Auth0, which require deep knowledge, WorkOS offers a more user-friendly, black-box approach. I could easily integrate SSO and SCIM and move on with my day.”

Today, Prefect can onboard enterprise customers faster than ever, saving hundreds of engineering hours. And ongoing maintenance is minimal - Chris estimates spending only about 1-2 hours per week in the WorkOS Dashboard.

With WorkOS, Prefect has been able to provide its enterprise customers a world-class auth experience while enabling its engineering team to stay focused on its core product.