Pricing behavior — Authentication & Identity
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Pricing
Pricing for Microsoft Entra ID
How pricing changes as you scale: upgrade triggers, cost cliffs, and plan structure (not a live price list).
Sources linked — see verification below.
Freshness & verification
Pricing behavior (not a price list)
These points describe when users typically pay more and what usage patterns trigger upgrades.
Actions that trigger upgrades
- Need stronger conditional access policies (device/risk controls)
- Need identity governance (reviews, approvals, lifecycle) at scale
- Need advanced security reporting and incident response capabilities
- Need hybrid identity integration and consistent access policies
- Need enterprise support/SLA for identity as core infrastructure
What gets expensive first
- Hybrid directory setups add ongoing operational overhead
- Governance features require process ownership, not just licensing
- Large tenants need strict admin role design to avoid policy drift
- Cross-tenant complexity appears quickly in M&A and multi-org setups
- Customer identity use cases can expand scope beyond Entra’s defaults
Plans and variants (structural only)
Grouped by type to show structure, not to rank or recommend SKUs.
Plans
- Core - Included/tenant-based - Baseline directory identity (varies by Microsoft licensing)
- Security - Per-user add-ons - Conditional access and advanced controls (see pricing page)
- Governance - Per-user add-ons - Reviews, lifecycle, and governance workflows (see pricing page)
Next step: constraints + what breaks first
Pricing tells you the cost cliffs; constraints tell you what forces a redesign.
Open the full decision brief →Sources & verification
Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.