Elementor is the leading WordPress website creation platform, serving web designers, developers, and agencies across the globe. As their customer identity needs grew, their engineering team decided to pursue a managed provider to reduce overhead. Their top requirement: the login experience needed to match the existing Elementor design exactly. Here’s how Descope met that pixel-perfect challenge while delivering flexible, secure authentication.
About Elementor
Elementor is the world’s most popular WordPress website creation platform. This allows users to design professional, responsive sites visually and in real time, completely eliminating the need to write or understand any code. Elementor users have created over 24 million sites, with more than 13% of the internet using the platform. The no-code editor serves a variety of different user types, from solo developers to marketing agencies.
Elementor offers a comprehensive suite of web development services, including hosting, transactional email, image optimization, and accessibility tooling. The creators of Elementor recently introduced Sticklight, an AI-powered platform that allows creators to build apps and dashboards using natural language.
The challenge of a growing user base
The authentication at Elementor was working: they had password-based login with social login layered on, and it served their users well. The issue was the overhead that came from owning and maintaining it. A growing user base meant that maintaining authentication infrastructure in-house was drawing engineering attention away from the product the Elementor developers were tasked with building.
Elementor sought a vendor not because they needed fundamental improvements to their auth system, but so their engineers could focus on refining their core offering. They wanted an auth provider who could reproduce what they already had while offering all the benefits of a managed solution: less maintenance overhead, a robust connector ecosystem, hands-on support.
Crucially, the Elementor platform is sold on the promise of pixel-perfect output, and the authentication screens their users encountered were a meaningful part of that experience. The appearance of every element, from button corners to color values, needed to exactly match their existing design.
The Descope experience
After evaluating their options, Elementor chose Descope for three reasons that mapped directly to their requirements:
Descope Flows, which offer flexible low / no-code authentication flow design through a visual, workflow-based editor.
A pricing model finely tuned to accommodate a high-volume B2C company’s growth trajectory rather than one that penalized rapid scaling.
Descope shipped several UX-focused capabilities to better serve the requirements set out by Elementor, resolving edge cases and meeting the visual expectations of their design-focused customers.
Gil Lupu, Software Engineering Group Manager at Elementor, said:
“The drag-and-drop design behind Descope Flows was familiar to us because we provide the same concept to our customers. Sharing that core philosophy really made Descope stand out.”
Building auth without compromising design
The early implementation work was heavily focused on design components, with Elementor and Descope closely collaborating to hit the level of granularity desired. Alongside the styling work, the teams worked through architectural questions, like whether Elementor’s multiple apps should be managed as separate Descope projects or consolidated. Descope helped them reason through these technical choices and arrive at a configuration that fit how their products actually relate to each other.
While the original in-house auth system had covered passwords and social login, the Descope implementation expanded the options to include magic links, single sign-on (SSO), and additional social providers, with passkeys under consideration.
Descope Flows became central to how Elementor built and maintained their authentication logic. Rather than treat authentication as a static path, Elementor used Flows to encode substantial business logic. They leverage multiple sign-in and sign-up flows for different clients and use cases, sub-flows that share common logic across them, and an HTTP connector that keeps their internal user database in sync on every sign-in and sign-up event.
They also integrate with a variety of Descope’s plug-and-play Connectors (reCAPTCHA, Mixpanel, Google Cloud Logging) and employ an audit webhook. For scenarios requiring deeper UI control, Elementor uses Descope’s Bring Your Own Screen (BYOS) functionality to render their own user interface while keeping Flows on the back end for authentication logic.
Gil Lupu, Software Engineering Group Manager at Elementor, said:
“From the start, the Descope team felt like an extension of our own. They understood what we needed for both auth and design and built alongside us to get there.”
Auth that grows alongside Elementor's vision
The main Elementor app saw great success with its Descope deployment. When the creators of Elementor sought auth for their new product, Sticklight, they once again chose Descope. Sticklight is a separate team from Elementor, offering an AI-powered web design suite with collaboration at its core. Sticklight uses Descope’s multi-tenant architecture to secure the collaboration component: users can create workspaces, add members, and manage permissions across them, with role-based access control (RBAC) applied at the workspace level.
Descope’s tenant architecture offers a secure and flexible option that most B2C tenant implementations simply don’t serve. The Sticklight team adopted Descope independently, but they were able to draw from the institutional knowledge the Elementor team had already built.
Gil Lupu, Software Engineering Group Manager at Elementor, said:
“We continued to expand how we used Descope for one simple reason: the product does what it promises, and the team behind it actually shows up.”
Identity delivered with pixel-perfect specifications
Authentication is no longer a burden Elementor engineers split their attention to address. The design requirements they sought in their evaluation were delivered by Descope, with new capabilities shipping to meet each need. What emerged from the collaboration between Descope and Elementor is a combination of powerful, flexible auth logic alongside a user-facing design experience that retains the platform’s uncompromised vision.
Elementor continues to expand their Descope implementation as their portfolio grows, with new products reaching for Descope based on this impressive foundation.
Descope is a flexible customer and agentic 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.
