7 Best Alternatives to Ping Identity for Securing AI Agents in 2026

Here's the uncomfortable reality: 79% of organizations lack written policies for governing AI agents, yet they've already shipped those agents into production, according to the 2025 EMA Agentic AI Identities survey commissioned by Ory.

Non-human identities now outnumber human identities 144 to 1, a 56% jump from the 92:1 ratio seen in the first half of 2024. Meanwhile, Palo Alto Networks' 2026 Identity Security Landscape report puts machine identities at 109 to 1 and sees companies expecting 85% growth in AI agents over the next 12 months.

Ping Identity earned its place securing human SSO and web apps. But agent traffic doesn't behave like a person logging into a portal. Agents make thousands of API calls per second, hold credentials in config files, and spawn sub-agents nobody reviewed. That's a fundamentally different problem.

The seven platforms below go beyond Ping's architecture with API-first design, deployment flexibility, and runtime least-privilege enforcement purpose-built for AI agents.

How We Evaluated These Alternatives

We evaluated these tools on five criteria: API-first and agent-native design, deployment flexibility, runtime least-privilege enforcement, scale and observability, and governance and lifecycle management.

We focused on organizations running AI coding agents, RAG pipelines, MCP servers, and autonomous workflows in production, where agents access internal data, customer data, and cross-system APIs.

• API-first and agent-native design: Does the platform treat agents as first-class identities with unique credentials, not borrowed human accounts?
• Deployment flexibility: Self-hosted, private cloud, and fully managed SaaS options for enterprises with data-sovereignty requirements.
• Runtime least-privilege enforcement: Dynamic, short-lived, scoped credentials with instant revocation, not static API keys sitting in config files.
• Scale and observability: Can it handle millions of agent-to-agent calls with trace-level logging and real-time audit trails?
• Governance and lifecycle management: Observability, onboarding, access reviews, and decommissioning.

1. Ory: Best API-First Platform for AI Agent Identity at Trillion Scale

Ory takes a fundamentally different starting point from any legacy IAM vendor. It's API-first, composable, and built for machine-scale identity from day one, and it already powers OpenAI's identity layer at more than 900 million weekly users.

That's not human SSO retrofitted for agents; it's web-scale identity infrastructure doing billions of transactions daily. With two dedicated agent security products launched in 2026, Ory is the most purpose-built option for teams shipping AI agents into production today.

• Scale proven at the extreme: Ory manages more than 3.25 billion identities across open source and commercial deployments, and its infrastructure powers 10 percent of the top 40 websites. Ory handles 4.4 billion transactions per day across 34,000+ production deployments, with 700+ million downloads and Docker pulls, plus over 45,000 GitHub stars. OpenAI adopted Ory Hydra for web-scale authorization and reached 1.2 billion weekly active users (as of Sept. 2026).
• Agent-specific architecture: Ory Agent Security, launched June 9, 2026, embeds an IAM control plane at the exact moment an agent acts, authenticating every agent and sub-agent, applying fine-grained authorization to shell commands, file writes, MCP tools, and API calls, and exporting every action via OpenTelemetry.
• Dynamic, short-lived, and scoped credentials: Ory Talos replaces static API keys with dynamic, short-lived, scoped, easily revocable credentials using Macaroon-based delegation and token derivation, preventing agents from carrying permanent secrets and credentials.
• Deployable the way enterprises actually want: 72.1% of organizations prefer self-managed LLM deployment, and those same organizations lean toward self-managed IAM, according to the 2025 EMA Agentic AI Identities survey cited above. Ory delivers both: highly engineered modular components (Ory Kratos, Ory Hydra, Ory Keto, Ory Oathkeeper, Ory Talos) deployable in self-managed environments (on-premises or private cloud), and a fully managed SaaS platform via Ory Network. That mix-and-match, headless design is transparent and composable.

Best for engineering teams that need API-first, headless IAM with full deployment control and OpenTelemetry-native observability for every agent action.

Less ideal if you want a turnkey GUI with minimal configuration; Ory's composable design rewards engineering investment rather than being a low-code solution.

If your team treats identity as code and needs trillion-scale agent traffic with trace-level observability, Ory is the natural fit.

2. Okta for AI Agents: Best Enterprise AI Agent Lifecycle Governance

Okta for AI Agents hit general availability on April 30, 2026, and it's the most mature enterprise IAM play for treating agents as first-class identities.

With two-thirds of the Fortune 100 already in the Okta ecosystem, it extends familiar governance to the agent layer: discovery, short-lived credentials, and a centralized kill switch.

The Agent Gateway mediates MCP tool calls, something legacy SSO architectures were never designed to handle.

• Okta brought Okta for AI Agents to GA with agent discovery, registration, short-lived credentials, lifecycle governance, and a kill switch for rogue agents.
• Governance depth sits inside the existing Okta admin console, so security teams can run agent access reviews alongside the human workflows they already know.
• Auth0, Okta's developer-focused sibling, covers the other end of the spectrum: it lets agents authenticate, manage short-lived scoped credentials, use Token Vault so agents never hold raw user keys, enforce fine-grained authorization in RAG workflows, and secure MCP servers with OAuth 2.1 and PKCE (Auth0).

Best for large enterprises already on Okta that want to extend existing IAM governance to agents in one console.

Less ideal if end-user experience is a top concern. Okta's unclaimed Trustpilot profile scores 1.3/5 from 49 reviews, dominated by re-authentication loops and login friction complaints. However, the contrast with enterprise-admin ratings on Gartner Peer Insights (4.6/5, 978 ratings) and G2 (4.5/5, 1,252 reviews) is stark.

If governance is the pivot and you already run Okta, this is the safest enterprise path to agent identity.

3. Microsoft Entra Agent ID: Best for Azure-Native and Microsoft 365 Shops

Microsoft Entra Agent ID extends the Entra identity fabric to AI agents, making it the path of least resistance for Azure, Microsoft 365, and Copilot Studio shops.

It natively supports the key agent protocols: OAuth 2.0, MCP, and A2A. Instead of Ping's perimeter-style SSO model, Entra places agent identity inside your existing tenant and applies adaptive access and real-time risk detection to agents the same way it does to users.

• Entra Agent ID is an identity and security framework that extends Microsoft Entra capabilities to AI agents, supporting OAuth 2.0, MCP, and A2A. It's available to all Microsoft Entra customers, per Microsoft.
• Agent identity blueprints, adaptive access policies, real-time risk detection, and lifecycle governance all live in the Entra admin center.
• Expanded governance requires a Microsoft Agent 365 license, so advanced controls sit behind a premium SKU.
• Gartner predicts up to 40% of enterprise applications will include integrated task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. Entra is positioned to catch that wave inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

Best for organizations deeply invested in Azure, Microsoft 365, and Copilot Studio.

Less ideal if you need multi-cloud neutrality or a self-hosted option outside Azure. Entra's strength is deep integration, not platform agnosticism.

If your identity plane is already Azure, this is the lowest-friction move.

4. SailPoint Agent Identity Security: Best for Governance-Heavy, Compliance-Driven Orgs

SailPoint brings AI agents into a mature identity governance platform that already aggregates identities from AWS, Azure, GCP, Salesforce, and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Its Agentic Fabric, announced in May 2026, unifies human, machine, and agent identity governance under one certification framework.

For regulated industries where access reviews aren't optional, and audit trails must be airtight, SailPoint's governance depth goes well beyond what Ping Identity's architecture was built to deliver for non-human entities.

• SailPoint Agent Identity Security aggregates agents from AWS, Azure, GCP, Salesforce, and Microsoft Copilot Studio, assigns owners, enables access reviews, and governs tool/service account access from creation to retirement.
• Financial services demand is telling: 67.6% of organizations express a strong preference for an all-in-one SaaS IAM platform, far exceeding the 50.4% cross-industry average, per the Q2 2026 EMA Agentic Survey.
• SailPoint announced a unified human/NHI/AI agent security platform at Black Hat 2026, a sign the identity silos are collapsing.
• In financial services, 62.2% say their IAM resiliency needs additional components for agentic AI, and 59.5% report security needs strengthening, both above cross-industry averages.

Best for highly regulated industries that need agent access certifications and audit-ready governance trails.

Less ideal if you need lightweight, developer-first tooling. On Reddit's r/cybersecurity, practitioners consistently call SailPoint "the most complicated to maintain" and "an expensive beast" that often requires significant add-ons or a suite of developers to fully integrate.

When compliance is the constraint, SailPoint remains a heavyweight worth its maintenance cost.

5. Idira (by Palo Alto Networks): Best PAM-Rooted Agent Security

Idira, rebranded in May 2026 when Palo Alto Networks absorbed CyberArk's identity stack, attacks AI agent security from the privileged access management angle.

Its roots in vaulting, session management, and zero standing privileges shape a different lens: agents are a privileged access problem first and an identity problem second.

Ping historically focused on human authentication events; Idira treats every agent-to-tool connection as a privileged session needing brokerage and governance.

• Idira integrates privileged access management, machine identity, and AI agent security, and its Secure AI Agents offering includes agent discovery plus an identity broker for MCP server governance.
• Zero standing privileges is the core pattern: agents don't carry permanent access; credentials are brokered per session. That aligns with the increasingly loud consensus that agents should never borrow human credentials.
• Agent discovery and an MCP identity broker let teams govern agent-to-server connections with PAM-grade session controls.

Best for security teams that think of AI agents as a privileged access problem and need PAM-grade controls for agent-to-tool connections.

Less ideal if you're not already in the Palo Alto Networks ecosystem; Idira's depth pays off most when you use the broader platform.

6. Aembit: Best Workload-First IAM for Secretless Agent Access

Aembit is the workload identity specialist here, not a human IAM platform retrofitted for agents. It authenticates workloads using cloud and host evidence rather than static secrets, which makes it architecturally aligned with agent-to-agent and agent-to-MCP-server flows.

Ping's model leans on user directories and SSO; Aembit's model is credential-less, contextual, and policy-driven.

• Aembit provides IAM for agentic AI and other workloads: it authenticates workloads, evaluates contextual access policies, brokers credentials, supports secretless access, and includes an MCP Identity Gateway for agent-to-MCP-server connections.
• It supports blended human-plus-agent identity, recognizing that agents often act on behalf of or alongside human users, with contextual policies that adapt accordingly.
• SOC2 and ISO27001 certification address compliance for regulated agent workloads.
• Cost matters: 47% of organizations report concerns about rising or unpredictable IAM costs, and 41% report security or reliability concerns with their current provider, per the Q4 2025 EMA Agentic AI Identities survey. A workload-specialist model can reduce cost sprawl versus full-stack platforms for agent-only use cases.

Best for DevOps and platform teams running agent-heavy Kubernetes or multi-cloud environments that want credential-less, policy-driven access.

Less ideal if you need a broad human CIAM alongside agent IAM. Aembit is a workload specialist, not a full-stack identity platform.

7. Keycloak: Best for Self-Hosted Agent Auth

Keycloak is the CNCF's open-source IAM workhorse, and it gives you a self-hosted path for authenticating AI agents with OAuth 2.0 client credentials and scoped tokens.

It isn't purpose-built for agents the way Ory, Okta, or Idira are, but Keycloak 26.5 added JWT Authorization Grant (RFC 7523), which supports the emerging OAuth Identity Chaining pattern for agentic workflows.

For zero licensing costs and full infrastructure control, it's the pragmatic open-source baseline.

• Keycloak supports OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML with fine-grained authorization services, SSO, and identity brokering. It can authenticate AI agents via client credentials and scoped tokens.
• Keycloak 26.5's JWT Authorization Grant supports OAuth Identity Chaining, relevant for multi-agent delegation scenarios.
• It has wide adoption in academic, government, and privacy-sensitive deployments where data sovereignty demands self-hosted infrastructure.
• 60.5% of organizations still use a hybrid human/service account management model for AI agents, according to the Q4 2025 EMA Agentic AI Identities survey. Keycloak can serve as a bridge for teams transitioning from service accounts to proper agent identities.

Best for teams that want full control, zero licensing costs, and are comfortable running their own IAM infrastructure.

Less ideal if you need turnkey agent lifecycle governance, agent discovery, or a managed SaaS option. Keycloak is infrastructure, not a platform, and lacks the agent-specific capabilities the commercial options ship natively.

Caveats and Counterpoints

No single platform solves everything. Organizations report using an average of three IAM platforms, and 34% use four or more, which makes unified authentication of AI agents nearly impossible, per the 2025 EMA Agentic AI Identities survey cited earlier. The survey further indicates that 52.8% prefer an all-in-one platform, and 24% have actually achieved this.

The survey findings also highlight that cost predictability is a real filter, as 47% of organizations report concerns about rising or unpredictable IAM costs.

And in financial services, only 29.7% have agentic AI deployed at scale for external customers, far below the 40.6% cross-industry average, according to EMA’s 2026 whitepaper (also commissioned by Ory) on AI Innovation and compliance in the financial sector. Translation: move deliberately, not blindly.