For companies that are already using other Atlassian systems, then Atlassian Crowd will fit in very well. This is especially the case if the company is not yet big enough to use LDAP for user management, Atlassian Crowd can act as a temporary solution until the company outgrows it, as it is much easier and simpler than LDAP.
This tool is essentially a hack, making the user experience pretty weak. For example, we use it in an application which has a box to type your password. Every time you enter some data, ESSO steals the focus and types your password into the box, even if you aren't about to submit the form requiring the password.
This tool creates a 2nd CN in the directory and this broke some of our applications which were only expecting a single CN per user in the directory. Why can't it use a traditional database instead?
This tool caused performance issues with Putty. It would peg our CPUs at 100% if the user had Putty running. It took a very long time to resolve the issue.
Overall, support is good, you get quick responses from Atlassian's official support system, and documentation is decent enough for you to find what you need.
These products allow you to install them on your own infrastructure, so you can manage all aspects of them which can prevent you from getting throttled from API calls. When you hit a certain threshold of scale you may need to switch off of Atlassian Cloud to your own hardware. When you are a small startup, however, this product is probably a good starting point.
There's no substitute for properly developed applications that delegate authentication to an external system like Active Directory or a cloud identity provider. That way, the issues with screen scraping and constantly-breaking integration are solved permanently.
New systems are tough when it comes to an ROI, as a dollar amount for saving time on a sign-in can be tough to track. Like most new systems that makes things slightly easier to execute as an end user or manage or support, it really might come down to the existing structure of how a company manages its users.
The positives are always with the end user, which I have to say, Crowd was able to accomplish.
We spent a lot of time implementing it on different applications. However, because it uses screen scraping, every time our apps upgraded, it broke the integration with ESSO, so we had to keep fixing the integration. After a few years, we have stopped integrating new apps with it due to this headache.
