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Microsoft Entra External ID

Microsoft Entra External ID
Formerly Azure Active Directory External Identities

Overview

What is Microsoft Entra External ID?

Microsoft Entra External ID (formerly Azure Active Directory B2C, or alternately, Azure Active Directory External Identities) provides business-to-customer identity as a service. Customers can use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to applications…

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 10,001+ employees
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Pricing

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Premium P1 (for More than 50,000 MAU)

$0.00325

Cloud
per month per active users

Premium P2 (for More than 50,000 MAU)

$0.01625

Cloud
per month per active users

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://azure.microsoft.com/en…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

DEMO Azure Active Directory Business-to-Business | Azure Active Directory B2C

YouTube

Modern Identity Platform powered by Azure cloud (Azure AD B2C/CIAM)

YouTube

Configure authentication in Angular and WEB API by using Azure Active Directory B2C | Demo | LSC

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Microsoft Entra External ID?

Microsoft Entra External ID is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution
The solution is capable of supporting millions of users and billions of authentications per day. It takes care of the scaling and safety of the authentication platform, monitoring, and automatically handling threats like denial-of-service, password spray, or brute force attacks.

Who uses Microsoft Entra External ID?
Any business or individual who wishes to authenticate end users to their web/mobile applications using a white-label authentication solution. Apart from authentication, the service is used for authorization such as access to API resources by authenticated users. It is meant to be used by IT administrators and developers.

Custom-branded identity solution
Microsoft Entra External ID is a white-label authentication solution. The user experience can be customized with a brand so that it blends with web and mobile applications. Pages displayed when users sign up, sign in, and modify their profile information can also be customized. Customize the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in user journeys so that the Microsoft Entra External ID experience looks and feels like it's a native part of the application.

Single sign-on access with a user-provided identity
Microsoft Entra External ID uses standards-based authentication protocols including OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). It integrates with most modern applications and commercial off-the-shelf software.

Integrate with external user stores
Microsoft Entra External ID provides a directory that can hold 100 custom attributes per user. However, the solution can be integrated with external systems. For example, it can be used for authentication, but delegate to an external customer relationship management (CRM) or customer loyalty database as the source of truth for customer data.

Another external user store scenario is to have Microsoft Entra External ID handle the authentication for an application, but integrate with an external system that stores user profile or personal data. For example, to satisfy data residency requirements like regional or on-premises data storage policies. However, the Microsoft Entra External ID service itself is worldwide via the Azure public cloud.

Progressive profiling
Another user journey option includes progressive profiling. Progressive profiling allows customers to coomplete their first transaction by collecting a minimal amount of information. Then, gradually collect more profile data from the customer on future sign-ins.

Third-party identity verification and proofing
Microsoft Entra External ID can be used to facilitate identity verification and proofing by collecting user data, then passing it to a third-party system to perform validation, trust scoring, and approval for user account creation.

Microsoft Entra External ID Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(55)

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
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September 21, 2022

Azure Active Directory B2C greatly connects with its peoples world

Verified User
Consultant in Product Management
Information Technology & Services Company, 51-200 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It help us to keep track of our teams groups and manage the user roles very easily. This also makes it easy to manage our sign in's with a nice overview chart of your monthly activity. There are a lot of apps and add-ins that work with this service. It works well with Microsoft Dynamics. There are a lot of tutorials that walk you through setting up and using this product. It's really a great turn-key system that is very secure and user friendly.
Pros and Cons
  • Single sign-on simplifies access to your apps from anywhere
  • Strong authentication for your customers using their preferred identity provider.
  • Integrating with social accounts such as Facebook or Google+
  • The Cost, This service is available on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis.
  • Customization features
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure Active Directory has so many features. I love that with the B2C Collaboration it easily let’s you smoothly operate between personal and business security. You can also expand or contract that instance as you wish thereby increasing performance or decreasing cost based on the demand time to time. I wish the product had more customizations for collaborations such as multimedia integration/authenticate users for Microsoft 365
Most Important Features
  • scopes to gather more information about consumers from various social identity providers
  • Ability of Azure AD B2C to work with CRM systems such as Microsoft Dynamics
  • Option to localize the UI pages and multi language support
Return on Investment
  • Good/Positive impact
  • increases productivity
  • Helps to maintain security and traffic of the users
Alternatives Considered
I really enjoy how simple it is to connect this Active Directory with other Microsoft Products to collaborate with colleagues and clients.
Other Software Used
February 25, 2022

Awesome product, lousy marketing -- it's Azure's best-kept secret!

Lars Kemmann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Lars Kemmann
Principal Architect
Netrix LLC (Information Technology and Services, 501-1000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure Active Directory B2C is our go-to platform for customer identity and access management (CIAM) needs, both for our internally-developed applications and products as well as for our clients' customer-facing applications. Despite the name, Azure Active Directory B2C excels at both business-to-consumer and business-to-business ("B2B") functionality; I often explain to people that "B2C" should be read as "business-to-customer." We have used Azure Active Directory B2C for everything from prototype apps and small business scenarios to very large enterprises with millions of user accounts.
Pros and Cons
  • Customer identity
  • User experience customization
  • Integration and configuration
  • Security
  • Availability/reliability
  • Troubleshooting diagnostic logs effectively requires VS Code
  • Group and role management requires additional effort
  • The programming model (XML) could use some developer experience love
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure Active Directory B2C is sufficiently flexible and configurable that it can work in just about any customer identity and access management (CIAM) scenario. Its pricing model also scales well for both small businesses (for whom it's almost always free) and very large enterprises (who can optimize the cost of multifactor authentication at scale by using the Premium P2 SKU). Azure Active Directory B2C is particularly useful in scenarios where you want to integrate multitenant (corporate) Azure AD apps, for single sign-on from your AAD customers, with other accounts for your non-AAD customers.

The only technical limitation we've encountered over the years is that, natively, Azure Active Directory B2C does not support device "fingerprinting"; however, this functionality can be added (if needed) through Microsoft's Fraud Prevention service or other third-party solutions.
Most Important Features
  • Configurability
  • Integration with Azure
  • Value
  • Security
  • Reliability
Return on Investment
  • Time to market for our products significantly reduced
  • Optimized our total cost of ownership for providing subscription SaaS solutions
  • Streamlined maintainability of solutions
Alternatives Considered
The best selling points for Azure Active Directory B2C that stand out from the competition are:
  • Pricing, both at small and very large scale (and in between), is hard to beat
  • The seamless integration with Azure should make Azure Active Directory B2C the first choice of CIAM platform for anyone building on Azure
  • Full compatibility with Azure AD's audit log format means Azure Active Directory B2C can be easily integrated into your SIEM tooling
Other Software Used
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