Stop Building and Maintaining Frankenstein IAM Platforms

A common task for many developer and security-centric teams is to provide an identity and access management (IAM) service. Whether that component only consists of a sign-up form and a login page or a more complex infrastructure, the number one priority is always to provide a seamless functionality for your users. Failure in implementation can have severe consequences. To reduce your risk and feel confident in your IAM platform, partnering seasoned professionals in the space ensures success.

Companies looking for authentication servers have the option to consider the solutions available in the market or build it themselves. As each option presents its own set of benefits and drawbacks, teams are often overwhelmed to make the right choice. In this article, we will cover the key pros and cons of each of the two options that help companies make the right decision for both short-term and long-term benefits.

Benefits of a Custom-built Platform

1. Built to your needs: Custom-built IAM platforms can be tailored to your organization's specific requirements. With a custom solution, you have complete control over the user experience and the technology choices. You can design authentication flows that align with your brand and user journey, creating a seamless experience that doesn't feel disconnected from the rest of your application. This customization extends to crucial workflows like user onboarding, password resets, and permission management—all of which can be optimized for your specific use cases rather than following a generic approach.
2. Enterprise Integrations: Enterprise environments often present complex integration challenges that off-the-shelf IAM solutions struggle to address effectively. A custom-built IAM platform can be architected from the ground up to integrate seamlessly with your existing technology ecosystem, regardless of its complexity or uniqueness. Legacy systems present a particular advantage for custom solutions. While many modern IAM platforms have limited support for older technologies or protocols, a custom solution can be built to bridge these gaps. Whether you're dealing with mainframe applications, custom LDAP schemas, or proprietary single sign-on systems developed in-house decades ago, a custom solution can be tailored to interface with these systems without compromise.
3. Control Over Data and Infrastructure: A custom-built IAM platform puts you in the driver's seat when it comes to data sovereignty and infrastructure decisions. This complete control means your organization retains ownership of user credentials, access patterns, and authentication logs—data that is often among the most sensitive your company manages. For organizations in regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, or government, this control can become crucial. Custom solutions allow you to construct specific data residency requirements, ensuring user information never leaves particular geographic boundaries or jurisdictions. You can also implement custom encryption schemes that go beyond standard offerings, creating multiple layers of protection for particularly sensitive identity data.
4. No Vendor Lock-in: Building your own IAM platform frees your organization from the constraints of vendor dependencies. This independence means you're not tied to a particular company's business decisions, product roadmap, or pricing strategies. If a vendor decides to sunset a feature your business relies on or dramatically increases licensing costs, organizations using off-the-shelf solutions may find themselves scrambling to adapt. Custom solutions also shield you from the impacts of acquisitions and mergers in the IAM market, which can often lead to discontinued products or significant changes in service quality and support. With your own platform, you maintain continuity regardless of market fluctuations.
5. Customized Compliance Implementation: Regulatory compliance requirements for identity management vary significantly across industries and regions. A custom IAM platform allows you to design compliance features that precisely address your specific regulatory landscape without unnecessary overhead. For example, a custom platform can be built with GDPR's right to be forgotten as a core architectural principle rather than an afterthought. Healthcare organizations can design authentication workflows that inherently enforce HIPAA requirements. Financial institutions can implement multi-factor authentication schemas that directly align with specific banking regulations in their operating regions.

Drawbacks of a Custom-built IAM Platform

While the benefits of custom-built IAM solutions are compelling, they come with significant challenges that organizations must carefully consider. The reality is that identity management is a specialized field requiring deep expertise in security, performance optimization, and regulatory compliance. Building your own platform means taking on the full burden of these complexities—often pulling focus and resources away from your core business objectives. The following drawbacks highlight why many organizations ultimately find that the apparent freedom of a custom solution can become a costly constraint.

1. Security Issues: A significant risk of building your own authentication server lies in its generally higher probability of security issues, which is usually due to a disproportionate time spent on building and not security implementation. Since keeping your users’ data safe is among the greatest responsibilities of the platform and the primary task of an IAM , it is essential to make sure an adequately established security system is given. One of the most obvious advantages specialized vendors have over DIY developers is the possession of a dedicated team with cybersecurity and software engineering expertise. The members of these teams can utilize their knowledge to create the best possible security system based on their diverse experiences. IAM vendors commonly offer advanced security features, such as support for multi-factor authentication (MFA) and security keys (Yubikey etc.). Another security aspect where third-party IAM solutions prevail is pattern recognition: they can prevent attacks more easily due to their large user base, whereas a custom-made solution does not possess enough data to recognize suspicious patterns. Keeping up with authentication best practices and standards becomes another insurmountable task for custom-built platforms, whereas IAM vendors can ensure compliance and adherence to standards.
2. Cost of Maintenance: Contrary to popular belief, you will likely find that building your own authentication server is not cheaper in the long run. While you might initially save money, that will quickly be compensated by the cost of development, maintenance, troubleshooting, upgrades, and the resources themselves that are needed for these procedures. Furthermore, you might find that unexpected expenses arise later on in your software’s lifetime: while initially you will likely implement a simple username + password login system, due to the high security requirements of a well-functioning authentication solution, you will most likely need to expand it with more complex features (f.e. Multi-Factor-Authentication, passwordless login options and more social logins). Also, since your primary business is likely in an unrelated field to the IAM itself, the inevitable shift in your working context would entail additional costs. When considering a custom-built solution, it is therefore beneficial to evaluate if the needed investments over the lifetime of your product are ultimately less than the amount you would have to pay for the one-time fee of the purchasable alternative.
   Add in the scale by a factor of (n) to address a multi-tenancy requirement for each customer with their own settings, and the cost of maintenance grows exponentially.
3. Expensive, in all aspects: When creating anything from scratch, you should probably reckon with a lengthy production process. This not only delays the “time to value” of your business-critical applications as you first need to build the IAM platform before you can make your application available to your users. This also applies to developing a service; given that authentication solutions require lots of API programming and complicated security features, fully building one might take at least a year as a full-time job. Since this service will handle sensitive data, the development of an adequately functioning security system also involves constant testing and optimizing, which should not be neglected to save time. The need for custom features also extends to the product phases well beyond the initial development: keeping your application functional and up to date requires you to additionally establish a maintenance system that will serve this purpose. Using an already established IAM solution would therefore likely save you several years of time, and money spent on essential resources.

Calculations based on our analysis

Benefits of Buying an IAM Platform

While custom-built IAM solutions offer some advantages, after examining the complex challenges of building one, it becomes clear why many organizations ultimately choose to purchase a dedicated IAM platform from specialized vendors. These purpose-built solutions offer numerous advantages that directly address the pain points of custom development.

1. Industry-Leading Security Expertise: Specialized IAM vendors focus exclusively on identity security, employing teams of security experts who dedicate their careers to staying ahead of emerging threats. This concentrated expertise translates into robust security practices that would be difficult for most organizations to replicate internally. Professional IAM solutions typically offer: Regular security audits and penetration testing with third party partners Rapid response and mitigation of vulnerabilities Advanced threat detection and prevention capabilities Compliance with the latest security standards and best practices and certifications
2. Faster Time to Market: Implementing a pre-built IAM solution dramatically accelerates your deployment timeline. What can typically take months or years to develop in-house can often be set up in weeks or even days with a vendor solution. This quick implementation means: Your core products and services launch faster Security enhancements reach your users more quickly Development resources stay focused on your business differentiators You realize return on investment sooner
3. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership: While the upfront licensing costs of purchased IAM solutions are visible line items in your budget, they typically represent a fraction of the total cost of building and maintaining a custom platform especially if you factor in the development time. A comprehensive IAM solution hence eliminates:

• Development costs for initial implementation of the security features
• Ongoing expenses for security updates and patching
• Infrastructure and operational overhead, especially for SaaS users
• Costs associated with specialized security talent acquisition and retention
• Expenses related to compliance certification and auditing

4. Continuous Innovation Without Internal Resources: Professional IAM vendors continuously improve their platforms, incorporating new authentication methods, security enhancements, and usability features as they emerge in the market. This ongoing innovation happens without draining your internal resources, allowing you to:

• Benefit from industry advancements automatically
• Support new standards and protocols without additional development
• Offer cutting-edge security features to your users
• Stay competitive with larger organizations that have more resources

5. Scalability and Reliability: Enterprise-grade IAM platforms are built from the ground up to handle massive scale with exceptional reliability. These solutions typically offer:

• High-availability architectures with redundancy built in
• Elastic scaling to handle usage spikes
• Global distribution for performance optimization
• Proven reliability under extreme load conditions
• Comprehensive monitoring and alerting options

6. Simplified Compliance Management: Managing compliance across multiple regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2, ISO27001, etc.) requires significant expertise and ongoing attention. Dedicated IAM platforms typically:

• Maintain compliance certifications so you don't have to
• Provide detailed audit logs and reporting
• Offer pre-built compliance frameworks for various industries
• Stay updated with evolving regulatory requirements
• Simplify your compliance audits with ready documentation

7. Professional Support and Expertise On-Demand: When issues arise (as they inevitably do), having access to specialized support can mean the difference between minor inconvenience and major business disruption. Established IAM vendors provide:

• 24/7 technical support from identity specialists
• Comprehensive documentation and implementation guides
• Professional services for complex deployments
• User community and knowledge sharing
• Training and certification programs

Bringing the Best of Both Worlds with Zitadel

Zitadel delivers enterprise-grade identity and access management without the development overhead of building your own solution from scratch. Unlike custom-built IAM systems that require significant engineering resources, ongoing maintenance, and security expertise, Zitadel provides a battle-tested, comprehensive solution out of the box. With Zitadel, organizations gain immediate access to modern authentication protocols, multi-tenancy support, robust user management, and authorization controls —all while avoiding the hidden costs, security vulnerabilities, and compliance challenges that often plague homegrown IAM implementations. By choosing Zitadel, your team can focus on core business objectives rather than reinventing complex identity infrastructure.

1. Developer-first, multi-tenant platform: As a developer-first multi-tenant platform, Zitadel gives you custom-level control with turnkey implementation - offering intuitive APIs, comprehensive SDKs, and detailed documentation that drastically reduces development resources while supporting complex multi-organization structures that would typically require months of custom coding. You can even build your own custom login UI using Zitadel's APIs while relying on its battle-tested security and standards implementation behind the scenes.
2. Flexible deployment: Zitadel offers the data sovereignty of custom solutions without the infrastructure burden. You have the ability to choose between the convenience of Zitadel Cloud with its zero-maintenance approach or the control of self-hosting in your own infrastructure - either way, you maintain full ownership of your identity data without the ongoing operational costs of a custom-built IAM platform.
3. Extensibility and Enterprise Integrations: Zitadel delivers adaptability at the level of a custom-built solution without the associated complexity of a custom-built IAM solution. Its extensive extensibility and enterprise integrations ensure seamless connection to your existing ecosystem through webhooks, actions, and pre-built connectors for enterprise systems, allowing for the same customization you get from building in-house without forking code, managing separate codebases, or compromising security.

Get Started

Get started with Zitadel, the comprehensive, ready-to-deploy Identity and Access Management platform rather than building one from scratch. We offer the ideal authentication platform with flexible pricing, a variety of deployment options, extensive features, enterprise-grade security, and unlimited identities across all instances.

Have questions about authentication or anything else? Connect with us on the Zitadel Discord Server. You can also find us on LinkedIn, GitHub, Bluesky, Twitter or through our website.

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