Different is an AI marketing system that lets lean B2B teams run demand generation at the scale of much larger organizations. Selling to businesses with strict requirements meant Different needed enterprise-grade identity from the start, while building a novel product with a vast surface area. Here’s how Descope helped them do both.
About Different
Marketing teams use Different to plan B2B campaigns across channels, with Different building the emails, ads, and landing pages that run those campaigns. The company’s promise is that a marketing team of five can do the work of 50.
Different was built AI-native from day one, with no assumptions about how marketing workflows traditionally run. That puts the product at the center of customers’ campaigns and marketing data. For the B2B companies Different works with, that level of access raises the bar on security.
Abhinav Yajurvedi, Co-founder and CTO at Different, said:
"Organizations are very sensitive about the security posture of the products they bring into their business, especially in the AI era. Before you even enter the product, you touch identity, so it was one of the first things we had to get right."
The challenge of enterprise identity with a lean team
The engineering team at Different had already written some identity abstraction of their own and weighed open-source options. Two requirements materialized that made standing up in-house B2B CIAM hard to justify:
Enterprise SSO for every customer: Customers of Different sign in through their own identity providers (IdPs), and supporting each one in-house would mean building and maintaining a growing list of integrations
Authorization with room to grow: Different needed roles and permissions that could start simple, then expand as the product took on more complex use cases
Abhinav Yajurvedi, Co-founder and CTO at Different, said:
"When we were starting out, the team was small and the surface area of the product was huge. Identity is critical, but it sits outside the core of what we build, so we wanted a partner who could own it while we focused on the product."
The Descope experience
Different evaluated several identity providers before choosing Descope. Their decision-making philosophy was the same as it was for any other part of their stack: favor responsive, developer-first companies that are easy to build with and open to feedback. As an agile, AI-forward organization, they prioritized an identity partner that could match their pace of innovation and offer rapid support.
The integration took about a month, with Descope's support team available throughout. The Different login page runs on Descope Flows, and prebuilt user widgets and admin widgets gave Different a working identity experience without needing to build core elements from scratch. Because the login experience lives in a Flow, Different can easily change identity journeys in a visual editor without touching application code or redeploying.
Read more: Choosing the Right Descope UI Integration Option
Today, users of Different sign in with enterprise SSO through their organization's identity provider or with social login, so there are no passwords to manage. New SSO connections go through the SSO Setup Suite, which walks through the configuration for any identity provider, maps attributes, and tests the connection before it goes live. The Different team can pre-configure part of a connection and hand the rest to the customer’s IT admin, with no coordination calls. Different plans to begin using the Suite’s fully self-service option in the future.
Each Different customer is its own tenant, and inside it, Descope handles role-based access control (RBAC), with super admin, admin, and user roles today, and an abstraction designed to take on more complex roles as they’re needed. Descope's user impersonation allows the Different team to easily diagnose hard-to-reproduce auth issues by seeing exactly what that customer sees, gated behind authorization checks and an approval step.
Since the successful integration, Different has explored everything from relationship-based access control (ReBAC) to Model Context Protocol (MCP) identity flows. Each time, Descope's team has been on hand to support them.
Enterprise-ready identity from day one
With Descope handling identity, Different’s engineers don’t have to second-guess whether their auth system will stand up to an enterprise customer’s security review. Their time is focused on refining their AI marketing offering.
Abhinav Yajurvedi, Co-founder and CTO at Different, said:
“Identity is one of the most underrated parts of any product. It’s a solved problem, but you have to solve it again for every new business, and each one brings its own nuance. Having a partner flexible enough to take on our requirements while taking away the tension around security is a huge relief.”
As an AI-native company, Different is already exploring what comes next, from agentic identity to finer-grained access, as the product grows into a full AI marketing system. Descope provides the tools to cover their next auth leap, and has already laid the groundwork for consistent iteration: access keys share the same JWTs and RBAC policies as user sessions, so Different test users and other non-human identities follow the same rules as everyone else.
Different promises marketers that a small team can do the work of a much larger one. With Descope addressing their identity challenges, the Different engineering team gets to work the same way.
Descope is a flexible drag & drop customer and agentic identity platform that helps organizations easily add authentication, authorization, and identity management to their apps, AI agents, and MCP servers. Customers use us for initiatives such as passwordless authentication, SSO, identity federation, strong MFA, fraud prevention, and agentic identity.
To get started with Descope, sign up for a Free Forever account. If you have questions about our platform, book time with our auth experts.
