Descope CIAM Platform vs Ory Agentic AI: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Descope CIAM Platform

Development teams moving away from homegrown auth will find Descope CIAM Platform's no-code flow builder cuts deployment time from weeks to days, letting you ship passwordless and MFA without hiring identity engineers. The drag-and-drop editor plus native SDKs for React, Next.js, Node.js, and nine other frameworks means your existing stack stays intact. Skip this if you need fine-grained authorization as your primary use case; Descope supports RBAC and ReBAC, but authorization is secondary to its authentication strength.

Ory Agentic AI

Enterprise security teams deploying autonomous AI agents need Ory Agentic AI because it's the only IAM platform purpose-built to authenticate and authorize agents with task-specific restrictions, not retrofitted from human identity tooling. The Model Context Protocol support and Google Zanzibar-inspired authorization model let you enforce least-privilege access at the agent level, which NIST CSF 2.0 Identity Management coverage confirms, and the headless API-first architecture means no UI friction when agents need to validate themselves at runtime. Skip this if your agents are still running unmediated or if you need identity solutions that also handle workforce access control in a single pane; Ory deliberately focuses on the agent authentication problem.