Auth0 Professional → Zitadel, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Zitadel saves you $4,664 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$121.75/hrBelow that rate, moving to Zitadel pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Auth0 Professional.
Auth0 Professional is billed flat rather than per seat, so team size does not change this comparison.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Auth0 Professional $240.00/month, flat, billed monthly | $240.00 |
| Every month | $240.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 25 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.17 |
| Your time 1.25 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $62.50 |
| Every month | $82.67 |
| Migration, once 20 hours of your time, our estimate | $1,000.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $157.33 |
| After one year | $888 |
| After 3 years | $4,664 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Auth0's operational record on the one service whose outage locks users out of everything else
- Attack protection, breached-password detection and bot defence as managed features
- The Auth0 Actions ecosystem
You gain
- Pricing that does not move with monthly active users
- A Go service with a much smaller operational footprint than a JVM identity server
- AGPL-3.0, with multi-tenancy and audit trails in the open-source build
Read this before you decide
- Everything on the Keycloak page applies here too: identity is the worst system to run badly, and a bad upgrade is a company-wide outage.
- Auth0 Professional is priced at up to 500 monthly active users. Above that its cost climbs steeply while Zitadel's does not, so check your own MAU before trusting this comparison.
- Twenty hours assumes you have migrated an identity provider before. If you have not, this is not a weekend.
Is the project alive?
zitadel/zitadel has 15,345 stars, was last pushed 3 days ago, and last cut a release (v4.19.5) 4 days ago. Licence: AGPL-3.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Auth0 figure is the site's own wording: “Professional $ 240 / month ... Up to 500 monthly active users”.
| Auth0 pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| zitadel/zitadel activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 30 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.