MFA Solutions Compared: Five Platforms Scored Side by Side

This is a side-by-side scorecard rather than a shopping list. Five MFA platforms scored against one rubric, so the differences that matter are visible.

Where this category splits

The dividing line is not feature count, it is whether a factor survives a phishing attempt.

Phishing-resistant by design (Yubico, HYPR, Beyond Identity) bind authentication to a hardware key or device credential, so a relayed prompt or a proxied login page gets nothing usable. This is the class NIST and CISA guidance points at, and the only class worth deploying to administrators.

Push and app-based (Duo, Microsoft Authenticator) are far easier to roll out and cover the whole estate quickly, but push approval is phishable unless number matching and risk signals are configured properly. Both vendors ship those controls; plenty of deployments leave them off.

Most organisations end up running both: a resistant class for privileged users, a broader class for everyone else. Score the platform on whether it can express that tiering in policy, not on the total number of factors it supports.

What has changed in the market

Duo is now one of very few identity products publishing real list pricing, at 0, 3, 6 and 9 dollars per user per month. Worth knowing if you buy it inside Cisco's User Protection Suite: purchases before 4 December 2024 included Duo Premier, purchases after include Duo Advantage, per Cisco's own offer terms.

How to read these scores

Every vendor here is scored on the same 10-dimension rubric. Scores are comparative within the category, not absolute: a 4.5 means strong relative to peers solving the same problem.

Three things the scores deliberately do not capture. They do not price your deployment, because most vendors in this category quote rather than publish. They do not measure fit with your existing stack, which is usually what actually decides it. And they do not predict vendor stability, which in identity has mattered more than features lately given the pace of consolidation.

Use this to narrow a field to two or three candidates on capability, then pilot against your worst case rather than the vendor's reference architecture.

Where to go next

For the full field, see top 10 MFA solutions for enterprises. For self-hosted options, see top open-source MFA and passwordless tools. For the evaluation process, see how to choose an MFA solution. To browse every profile, see the MFA vendor directory.