Is Microsoft Entra ID a suitable option for a small SaaS solo project with growth potentials?

Question

I am a .NET developer working on a personal project for what hopefully will be a web-based SaaS application someday. This application will run on Microsoft Azure.

Although I have 20+ years of experience with .NET, this is my first try at working on a SaaS application and I have minimal experience with Azure. With Azure, I only have a free account for personal needs with basic services.

There are some technical decisions that I have to make, one of them is what identity and access management solution to use. My application at launch will have a limited number of users but potentially can grow to several thousands, even hundreds of thousands, I have been looking into some options. One of them is Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory).

My question is: does it make sense to use a solution like Microsoft Entra, considering that I am a solo developer without a company infrastructure? MS Entra is always described as an authentication and authorization service for a company with an infrastructure, thus my doubts is that Entra may be overkill for my needs, or just not suitable. If not suitable, can anyone suggest a better option?

Answer 1

Microsoft Entra Id is for managing employee access:

Microsoft Entra ID is a cloud-based identity and access management service that enables your employees access external resources.

To allow external users to sign in Microsoft Entra Id for Customers is a better choice. It is in preview and a successor to Azure B2C. It supports setting up sign-up and sign-in flows etc:

Microsoft Entra ID for customers is Microsoft’s new customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution. For organizations and businesses that want to make their public-facing applications available to consumers, Microsoft Entra ID makes it easy to add CIAM features like self-service registration, personalized sign-in experiences, and customer account management.

I've only working with Azure B2C, but since it will be replaced by Microsoft Entra ID I have not doubt it will also scale well for small groups of users to many many more.