SC

Strategy Canon

OneLogin

OneLogin launched the same hosted sign-on as Okta with a bigger early catalog, stayed with smaller companies on a fraction of Okta's funding, saw its sales pipeline stall for a quarter after a 2017 breach, and was sold to One Identity in 2021 with about 5,500 customers.

Why OneLogin lost to Okta

  1. 1 · 2009–11Hosted sign-on on a $1.5M Series AFounded in 2009; 1,700+ pre-integrated apps by June 2011, more than Okta's 1,200 that December.

    ON2ON5OK23

    Managed Service
  2. 2 · 2011–17Stayed with smaller companies1,000+ customers on $42M+ raised (2014), against Okta's $230M by 2015; three CMOs and four sales leaders in three years.

    ONX-6ONX-10ONX-1

  3. 3 · 2016–18Two breaches, then a stalled pipelineMay 2017 AWS-key breach; Gartner said it had to compete on more than price against Okta or Microsoft.

    ONX-5ONX-1

  4. 4 · 2017–21Expansion stalled after the breach, then grew too slowly70+ customers above $100K in ARR by January 2019, with a $100M ARR goal.

    ONX-2ONX-3

  5. 5 · 2011–21A sticky base, sold at about 5,500 customersOne Identity closed its purchase on October 1, 2021, terms undisclosed.

    ONX-7

Versus Okta: Okta raised $28 million by August 2011 and $230 million by September 2015, won large enterprises with a large sales force as the more secure vendor that never went down, in SaaStr's account of its early years, and grew inside those accounts to more than 13,000 customers, with Auth0, by 2021 OK22 ONX-10 OK3 ONX-8. OneLogin built the bigger early catalog on a $1.5 million Series A, sold to smaller companies, and after its 2017 breach kept most of its customers while their expansion stalled ON5 ONX-1 ONX-2.

Arena: Market Conditions Before OneLogin

IT teams at companies adopting cloud applications · 2011 · United States

Disconnected workflows

By 2011 a company's employees signed in to a growing list of cloud applications such as Salesforce, Google Apps, Box and Workday, each with its own account and password ON5 ONX-6. Executives worried about the security of their most sensitive data as it moved out from behind the firewall ON5. The IT team had lost the central control it once held: it still needed to enforce security policies, create and suspend accounts in every application as people joined or left, and keep an audit trail for compliance, while employees juggled separate logins ON5 ONX-6. The company directory, such as Active Directory, held the list of who worked there, and nothing connected it to the applications outside ON5 ONX-6.

How each step happened

Step 1 of 5 · 2009–11

Hosted sign-on on a $1.5M Series A

Okta and OneLogin built the same product at the same moment, and Okta funded it far faster. Okta's founders dropped a systems-management idea after executive interviews in 2009 and turned to sign-on for cloud applications such as Salesforce and Google Apps OK45 OK53 OK22. They raised a $10 million Series A and then a $16.5 million Series B, for $28 million by August 2011 OKX-9 OK22. When Okta raised that Series A, OneLogin had $150,000 in seed money and leaned on design partners OKX-9.

OneLogin started from a customer problem of its own. Thomas Pedersen, who founded the company with his brother in 2009, saw Zendesk customers struggle with another set of credentials for each new app ON2 ONX-4 OKX-9. By June 2011 its catalog held more than 1,700 pre-integrated applications, more than the 1,200 Okta listed that December ON5 OK23. That month it closed a $1.5 million Series A from Charles River Ventures ON5. Pedersen aimed it at smaller buyers: "We founded OneLogin on the premise that small and mid-sized businesses should have access to the same level of security as large enterprise companies" ON5.

Rivals Okta turned to sign-on for the same cloud applications and had raised $28 million by August 2011 OK45 OK22.

Managed Service

Step 2 of 5 · 2011–17

Stayed with smaller companies

Okta moved upmarket early. In 2011 McKinnon said he had expected small and mid-sized buyers but was seeing large companies sign up OK22. Okta sent a large, aggressive enterprise sales force into bigger accounts, and McKinnon later told founders to build for the enterprise from day one, since product-market fit found with small companies rests on a different customer OK3 OK24. Money paid for the push: Okta had raised $230 million by September 2015, when it had about 2,500 customers, and sales and marketing took 91% of its revenue in fiscal 2016 ONX-10 OK38.

OneLogin kept its first choice. In December 2014 it raised $25 million led by Scale Venture Partners, bringing total funding past $42 million, and served more than 1,000 corporate customers in over 100 countries ONX-6. Its go-to-market team turned over: three CMOs and four sales leaders came and went in three years, and Brad Brooks, CEO from August 2017, named go-to-market its biggest problem ONX-1 ONX-5. OneLogin ended 2017 with 2,000 paying customers ONX-1. Its turn toward much larger enterprise accounts came only around mid-2017 ONX-2.

Rivals Okta sent a large enterprise sales force into bigger accounts and had raised $230 million by September 2015 OK3 ONX-10.

Top-Down Selling

Step 3 of 5 · 2016–18

Two breaches, then a stalled pipeline

Okta sold the large buyers it now targeted on trust. In Jason Lemkin's SaaStr account of a McKinnon talk, Okta won its early accounts as the most enterprise vendor, the more secure option that never went down OK3. Okta went public in April 2017, less than two months before OneLogin's second breach, and trade press called its momentum afterward strong OK38 ONX-1.

OneLogin was breached twice. An attacker read its Secure Notes data in cleartext, and less than a year later, on May 31, 2017, used one of its AWS keys to reach user, app and key data ONX-5. Second-quarter revenue fell sharply, and Brooks says sales stalled for about a quarter while prospects waited to see whether the company would survive ONX-1 ONX-5. Most customers stayed: of about 30 that Gartner surveyed, two or three shut the service off ONX-1. The damage fell on new business. Gartner's Gregg Kreizman said in 2018 that OneLogin had to prove its viability and compete on more than price when it met Okta or Microsoft, and its list prices ran from $2 to $8 per user per month ONX-1 OKX-17.

Rivals Okta won early accounts, in Lemkin's account of McKinnon's talk, as the more secure vendor that never went down, and went public in April 2017 OK3 OK38.

Step 4 of 5 · 2017–21

Expansion stalled after the breach, then grew too slowly

Okta's large accounts grew after the first sale. In late 2018 the State Department, which had bought Okta for more than 100,000 outside partners, extended it to its whole workforce OK39. Its dollar-based retention rate was 123% in fiscal 2017 and had consistently exceeded 120% by fiscal 2018 OK38. Customers paying over $100,000 a year rose from 255 in fiscal 2016 to 1,467 in fiscal 2020 and 1,950 in fiscal 2021 OK38 OK40 OK29. Revenue climbed from $85.9 million in fiscal 2016 to $260.0 million in fiscal 2018 OK38. By September 2021 Okta and Auth0 had more than 13,000 customers, over 2,600 of them above $100,000 in annual contract value ONX-8.

OneLogin's expansion stalled after the breach and recovered too slowly to close the gap. Brooks says customers stayed but at first did not expand their use ONX-2. Its enterprise turn produced more than 70 customers paying well over $100,000 in ARR by January 2019, and revenue grew 100% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2018, partly through upsells ONX-2. In 2018 Brooks set a goal of $100 million in ARR within about two and a half years, roughly half of Okta's latest annual subscription revenue ONX-1 ONX-3. At the sale, Forrester wrote that OneLogin's "customer adoption has lagged that of vendors such as Microsoft, Okta, and Ping Identity" ON2.

Rivals Okta widened the State Department from outside partners to its whole workforce and, with Auth0, had more than 2,600 customers above $100,000 in annual contract value by September 2021 OK39 ONX-8.

Land and Expand

Step 5 of 5 · 2011–21

A sticky base, sold at about 5,500 customers

Okta said its base drew vendors to build to it. Its 2017 S-1 counted more than 5,000 integrations as of October 2016 and said more customers brought more software vendors building on its platform OKX-22. Vendors submitted their own integrations through a self-service portal by 2020, and McKinnon says some large buyers tell vendors to build and certify an Okta integration before they buy OKX-23 OK49 OK4. Okta listed more than 8,000 apps in 2026, and its customers deployed 89 apps on average in 2022 and 101 in 2025 OKX-24 OK27.

OneLogin had led on catalog size in 2011 and supported 4,000 cloud services by December 2014 ON5 ONX-6. Its accounts were sticky: Pedersen puts churn below 5% despite the 2017 breach OKX-9. That base stood at about 5,500 customers when One Identity, part of Quest Software, closed its purchase of OneLogin on October 1, 2021, on undisclosed terms ONX-7. PitchBook data valued OneLogin at $330 million in its 2019 round, and Forrester estimated the price at $400 million to $600 million ONX-7 ON2. Forrester saw it as the SaaS access piece beside One Identity's on-premises governance and privileged-access tools ON2.

Rivals Okta grew its integration network to more than 8,000 apps by 2026 OKX-24. OneLogin answered with a campaign inviting Okta customers to switch, built on 6,000-plus integrations and in-house support, and cited Herman Miller moving a former Okta customer's 50 apps in two weeks ONX-9.

Key dates

  1. 2009Okta settles on hosted sign-on after executive interviews OK45
  2. 2009Thomas Pedersen and his brother found OneLogin ON2 ONX-4 OKX-9
  3. 2011-06$1.5M Series A; 1,700+ pre-integrated apps ON5
  4. 2011-08Okta has raised $28M OK22 OK23
  5. 2014-121,000+ corporate customers $25M round; $42M+ raised in total ONX-6
  6. 2015-09About 2,500 Okta customers Okta raises $75M at a $1.175B valuation; $230M raised in total ONX-10
  7. 2017-04Okta closes its IPO OK38 ONX-4
  8. 2017-05AWS-key breach; customers told to rotate keys ONX-5
  9. 2017-08Brad Brooks becomes CEO ONX-5
  10. 2017-122,000 paying customers End of 2017 ONX-1
  11. 2018-03Gartner: must compete on more than price against Okta or Microsoft ONX-1
  12. 2019-012,500+ customers $100M Series D; 70+ customers above $100K ARR ONX-3 ONX-2
  13. 2021-09Okta reports 13,000+ customers including Auth0 ONX-8
  14. 2021-10About 5,500 customers One Identity closes its purchase, terms undisclosed ONX-7
  15. 2021-10Forrester: adoption lagged Microsoft, Okta and Ping ON2

Sources

Oldest first.

  1. ON5 OneLogin raises funding for identity and access management. OneLogin · 2011-06-24 Primary disclosure
  2. OK22 Khosla, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz put $16.5M in enterprise cloud app management startup Okta. Leena Rao, TechCrunch · 2011-08-08 Reporting
  3. OK23 Enterprise cloud app manager Okta now enables a single sign-on to over 1K web apps. Leena Rao, TechCrunch · 2011-12-15 Reporting
  4. ONX-6 OneLogin nets $25M to build identity management for the cloud era. SiliconANGLE (Maria Deutscher) · 2014-12-17 Contemporaneous trade press
  5. ONX-10 Okta joins unicorns with $75M round and looks towards IPO. TechCrunch (Ron Miller) · 2015-09-08 Contemporaneous trade press
  6. OKX-22 Okta, Inc. Form S-1 (Okta Application Network passages). Okta, Inc. / SEC EDGAR · 2017-03-13 Regulatory filing
  7. OK38 Okta, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal year ended January 31, 2018. Okta, Inc. / SEC EDGAR · 2018-03-12 SEC filing
  8. ONX-1 Why 2018 could be OneLogin's year. VentureBeat (Blair Hanley Frank) · 2018-03-14 Trade press with executive quotes
  9. OK45 Okta's co-founder and COO on his path to success and what's next for the company. Peter High, Forbes · 2018-08-28 Founder interview
  10. OKX-17 OneLogin pricing comparison (Starter, Enterprise, Unlimited). OneLogin · 2018-11-30 Company price sheet
  11. OK39 Okta fiscal Q3 2019 earnings call prepared remarks (Ex. 99.2). Okta, Inc. / SEC EDGAR · 2018-12-05 SEC filing
  12. OK3 Top 10 learnings from Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, on scaling to the first $30m ARR. Jason Lemkin, SaaStr · 2019 Founder interview
  13. ONX-2 OneLogin Solidifies Comeback With $100 Million. Crunchbase News (Savannah Dowling) · 2019-01-10 Trade press with executive quotes
  14. ONX-3 OneLogin raises $100 million to help enterprises manage access and identity. VentureBeat (Kyle Wiggers) · 2019-01-10 Trade press with executive quotes
  15. ONX-4 OneLogin snares $100M investment to expand identity solution into new markets. TechCrunch (Ron Miller) · 2019-01-10 Trade press with executive quotes
  16. ONX-5 How OneLogin responded to its breach and regained customer trust. CSO Online (Dan Swinhoe) · 2019-04-16 Trade press with executive quotes
  17. OK24 Todd McKinnon: creating and defining a new market category (Founder's Field Guide EP.7). Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Invest Like the Best / Colossus (Happy Scribe transcript) · 2020 Transcript read
  18. OKX-23 Okta Classic Engine release notes (2020). Okta Help Center · 2020 Company product documentation
  19. OK40 Okta, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal year ended January 31, 2020. Okta, Inc. / SEC EDGAR · 2020-03-06 SEC filing
  20. OK4 Why my family continues to invest in Okta shares. Chong Ser Jing, The Good Investors · 2020-04-15 Investor analysis
  21. OK53 Go Time with Todd McKinnon. Mike Maples Jr., Starting Greatness (Floodgate) · 2021 Transcript read
  22. ON4 OneLogin single sign-on overview. OneLogin · 2021 Primary product documentation
  23. OK29 Okta, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal year ended January 31, 2021. Okta, Inc. / SEC EDGAR · 2021-03-04 SEC filing
  24. ONX-8 Okta Q2 fiscal 2022 earnings call transcript. The Motley Fool (transcript) · 2021-09-01 Earnings call
  25. ON1 One Identity acquires OneLogin. One Identity · 2021-10-04 Primary disclosure
  26. ONX-7 One Identity has acquired OneLogin, a rival to Okta and Ping in sign-on and identity access management. TechCrunch (Ingrid Lunden) · 2021-10-04 Trade press with executive quotes
  27. ON2 Perspectives on One Identity's acquisition of OneLogin. Forrester · 2021-10-08 Outside analysis
  28. OK27 Businesses at Work 2022. Okta, Inc. · 2022-02 Company announcement
  29. OKX-9 Thomas Pedersen - Bunny & OneLogin (#57). Not Another CEO (David Politis, Substack) · 2025-08-05 Founder interview
  30. OKX-24 Unlock SaaS growth: Auth0 and the Okta Integration Network. Auth0 blog (Ruby Ko, Okta product marketing) · 2026-03-04 Company post aimed at ISVs
  31. OK49 Submit an integration to the Okta Integration Network (overview). Okta developer documentation · 2026-09-24 Company announcement
  32. ONX-9 The OneLogin vs. Okta Difference. OneLogin · undated (retrieved 2026-10-14) Company marketing page