STACK vs. Descope

These products solve different problems for different teams.

Descope is the External IAM Platform (descope.com). Their core business is customer authentication: B2C signup, B2B partner onboarding, workforce SSO. In January 2026 they shipped Agentic Identity Hub 2.0, which extends that console to cover agents and MCP tool scopes. If your company already runs Descope for end-user auth, “agent identity” lives in the same tenant.

STACK is the runtime control plane for agents. Our wedge is what happens after an identity is issued. Credentials never leave the vault. Every outbound call routes through a proxy that re-checks intent, scope, and behavioral signals. Every action lands in a hash-chained audit log. A single revocation cascades through all five layers in under 60 seconds.

So the question this page exists to answer isn't “which is better.” It's “which problem do you have right now.”

Where the line is

Descope decides who the agent is.

STACK secures what the agent does once it has identity.

Those are distinguishable problems and they show up in different parts of an org chart. Customer-IAM teams reach for Descope because the agent surface is an extension of work they already own. Platform-engineering and security teams reach for STACK because runtime control is their actual problem and customer auth is already solved somewhere upstream (sometimes by Descope itself, sometimes by Auth0 or Okta, sometimes by something internal).

If you're choosing between us today, the honest framing is organizational. End-user identity the dominant unsolved problem? Descope. Runtime control the dominant unsolved problem? STACK. Both unsolved? Start with whichever is bleeding you faster.

Two deltas worth knowing

Policy enforcement timing. Descope evaluates policy at credential issuance via the Flows engine. STACK evaluates at issuance and again on every outbound call via the credential proxy. The difference matters when an agent is granted a token with broad scope and then talks to high-stakes APIs over a long session. Descope trusts the token until expiry. STACK re-checks intent and scope on every call and fires detectors (prompt injection, output exfiltration, scope drift, behavioral anomaly) at the proxy boundary.

Compliance stack. Descope's is broader: SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP High Authorized, CSA STAR Level 2, PCI DSS. STACK is narrower today (no SOC 2 yet) but has EU AI Act Article 14 mapped clause-by-clause publicly, which Descope does not. If federal or healthcare procurement is your gate, Descope clears it today. If EU AI Act Article 14 alignment is on your procurement checklist, STACK has the mapping work done. Neither is a strict superset.

Authenticating users into a console is one job. Keeping an agent inside its lane after it's been authenticated is a different job. Talk to us if the runtime-control problem is what keeps you up at night.

Last reviewed 2026-05-09. Claims about Descope sourced from descope.com and the Agentic Identity Hub 2.0 announcement (January 2026).