Short answer. The best CIAM solution is the one that fits how your customers and partners sign in and are managed, not the one with the longest feature list. This guide helps you define your needs, weight them, and match CIAM software to your use case.
Define your user model before you shortlist
Answer five questions before you look at a single vendor:
- Who signs in? Consumers, business users, or both.
- How are business users grouped? Flat companies, or companies with branches and divisions.
- How do partners sign in? Through their own identity provider, through yours, or a mix.
- Who manages users? Your team, each customer's administrator, or both.
- What must happen when someone leaves? Including sessions already open and access to other organizations.
Your answers decide which criteria matter most.
Weighted selection criteria
Suggested weights for a product that serves business customers. Adjust them to your answers above.
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Organization model and delegated administration | 25% |
| Partner sign-in and federation | 20% |
| Authorization in organization context | 15% |
| Lifecycle and audit | 15% |
| Extensibility and developer experience | 10% |
| Deployment, security and compliance | 10% |
| Cost as you grow | 5% |
Score each vendor from 1 to 5 per criterion, multiply by the weight, and test the top two in a proof of concept.
Best CIAM solutions by use case
- B2B software serving many customer companies: look for organizations, delegated administration and per-customer single sign-on. SecureAuth is built for this.
- Dealer, supplier and partner portals: look for sub-organizations for branches, hosted sign-in for small partners without an identity provider, and partner administrators. SecureAuth supports all three.
- Products with consumers and business accounts: look for one platform that handles self-service consumer sign-up and organizations side by side.
- Regulated industries: look for policy-based authorization, audit events you can send to your own systems, and clear data residency options.
What buyers get wrong
- Testing only the login. Also test role changes, leavers and open sessions.
- Assuming a hierarchy passes everything down. Ask exactly what sub-organizations inherit and what they do not.
- Forgetting partners without an identity provider. Small partners need hosted sign-in and their own administrator.
- Ignoring people in several organizations. Consultants and shared-service staff need clean switching between organizations.
- Pricing on today's numbers. Model cost at your expected number of users and organizations.
Test your user model in a free SecureAuth trial.
Start your free trialFrequently Asked Questions
What does CIAM stand for and what does it do?
Customer identity and access management. It lets the people who use your product sign up, sign in and manage their access securely, and lets you control what they can do.