For an Indian product, NamoID is the stronger fit on the two things that decide an India deployment: where the data actually sits, and which Indian rails the platform speaks. NamoID runs primary identity workloads in AWS Mumbai and ships DigiLocker, Aadhaar offline e-KYC, cKYC, DLT-registered SMS, WhatsApp OTP and Truecaller verification. MojoAuth's published residency options are US, EU and Asia-Pacific, and it offers passwordless authentication without India-specific verification rails.

MojoAuth is the closest comparison in this category — both are standards-based identity providers with SAML and OIDC rather than SDK-locked platforms. So the distinction is narrower than in most comparisons, and it comes down to how literally you need "in India" to mean India.

NamoID vs MojoAuth at a glance

Decision	NamoID	MojoAuth
Primary infrastructure	AWS Mumbai	Choose US, EU or Asia-Pacific at setup
India region	Yes, explicitly	Not listed as a distinct region
India KYC rails	DigiLocker, Aadhaar offline e-KYC, cKYC, Truecaller	None published
India OTP rails	DLT-registered SMS, WhatsApp OTP	Email and SMS OTP, not DLT-specific
DPDP evidence	Append-only audit, consent records, export, retention	GDPR-oriented compliance posture
Protocol	OAuth 2.1-aligned OIDC, SAML for enterprise sign-in	SAML 2.0 and OIDC
Passwordless	Email OTP, magic links, passkeys, phone OTP	Email OTP, magic links, passkeys — core focus
Currency	Rupees, from a published India price book	US dollars
Free tier	See published India price book	25,000 MAU
Overage	See published India price book	$0.06 per MAU

"Asia-Pacific" is not the same as India

This is the substantive point for a DPDP-conscious team. MojoAuth's documentation describes data residency as "Choose US, EU, or Asia-Pacific during setup," with user data stored in the selected region. India is not named as a distinct region, and Asia-Pacific in most vendor topologies resolves to Singapore.

For some products that is perfectly acceptable — DPDP Rule 15 uses a negative-list model, so most cross-border transfers remain lawful. But it matters when:

a customer's security questionnaire asks where identity data is physically stored;
you operate in a sector whose regulator expects India-resident data;
your vendor review must name a country rather than a continent; or
you are documenting a data path for a DPDP audit trail and "Asia-Pacific" is not a specific enough answer.

NamoID's answer is a country and a region: primary identity workloads in AWS Mumbai, with optional providers and subprocessors documented per integration rather than hand-waved. If your reviewer needs India, ask any vendor to name the region and put it in writing. See data localization in India for what the rule does and does not require.

The India rails are the real gap

Both products do passwordless authentication competently. Neither passwordless nor SAML is the differentiator here. The differentiator is everything India-specific that sits around authentication:

DigiLocker integration — the OAuth consent redirect, listing issued documents, pulling a signed copy you can verify.
Aadhaar offline e-KYC XML — parsing the UIDAI-signed ZIP, verifying the signature, and masking so all twelve digits are never stored.
cKYC 2.0 — India's central KYC registry as a real-time, consent-first API.
DLT-registered SMS — TRAI's registration regime, template approval, and the cost and deliverability consequences of getting it wrong.
WhatsApp OTP and Truecaller verification — the channels Indian users actually expect.
Account Aggregator consent — a signed, purpose-bound artefact that is not an OAuth token.

A global passwordless platform will not ship these, because they serve one market. If your product needs verified identity rather than just a reachable contact, this list is the project — and it is the part that takes months rather than days.

Cost shape

MojoAuth's published pricing includes a free tier at 25,000 MAU and Business Pro starting at $50 per month for 5,000 MAU, with per-MAU rates falling from about $0.0100 at 5,000 users to $0.0030 at two million. Its published overage rate is $0.06 per MAU — the highest of the providers we have surveyed in this category, and worth modelling if your traffic is spiky or seasonal, which is common for Indian consumer products around festival and exam cycles.

NamoID's plans are free, startup, growth and enterprise, published in rupees on the pricing page from the live price book rather than hardcoded here. Billing in rupees also removes forex variance from your identity line item, which a global vendor billing in dollars cannot do.

Figures for both change; verify each vendor's current published rates before deciding.

What you are not building on day one

Beyond the India rails, a product that reaches business customers eventually needs organizations, memberships and invitations, then a SAML service provider that rejects replayed assertions and unsafe XML, rotates signing keys without breaking live connections, and fails closed on expired state or a revoked connection. Then subscription billing with provider webhooks, signature verification and dunning.

Treat any single time estimate with suspicion, including ours. The build-versus-buy analysis deliberately gives no number, because auth never reaches "done", only "running". The defensible version: organizations, a credible SAML integration and DPDP audit evidence is a multi-month effort for a team without identity specialists, and it recurs as maintenance rather than ending at launch. That is why DIY auth keeps failing at Indian startups.

Availability, stated plainly: customer organizations and enterprise SSO are implemented in the platform and enabled per instance rather than self-serve at signup, and Razorpay-backed customer billing is in final rollout. The benefit is that these exist to switch on when your first enterprise customer asks for SAML. Confirm current availability for your instance before planning a launch around it.

The controls a security reviewer will ask about

Enforced in the platform and observable in behaviour rather than asserted in a brochure:

PKCE on every authorization flow, including first-party clients; no implicit flow.
Refresh-token rotation with replay detection — a refresh token used twice revokes the entire chain and emits a security event.
Append-only audit events on state changes, which is what makes DPDP evidence real rather than reconstructed.
Aadhaar masked at rest — last four digits, a name hash and a signature-verification result; the full XML is processed in memory and never persisted.
Provider tokens encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, never written to logs.
Rate limits on authentication and OTP endpoints, a billing control as much as a security one.
Tenant-scoped queries so one workspace cannot read another's data.

Ask any vendor to demonstrate refresh-replay revocation and show the resulting audit record. Both are visible in a one-day proof, and neither can be faked in a demo.

Authorization is still yours

Neither product can infer your business policy. Your API validates issuer, audience, expiry and scopes; the resource decision remains yours. A token carrying invoices:read may permit the operation while your application must still confirm the invoice belongs to the caller's organization. See multi-tenant authentication for SaaS.

Decide with a working proof

Build a one-day proof against both: sign in, validate a token in your backend, protect two roles, revoke a session, inspect the audit event. Then ask each vendor to name the exact region your identity data will live in, and to show you how a DigiLocker or Aadhaar verification would work in their platform. Those two questions usually settle it for an Indian product.

The Indian startup auth decision guide covers the wider shortlist. Start free, or bring your stack to the NamoID Slack community.

NamoID is not affiliated with or endorsed by MojoAuth. MojoAuth pricing, regions and features were sampled in September 2026 from published sources and change frequently — verify current details in MojoAuth's own documentation before deciding. This article is product guidance, not legal advice or a promise of compliance.

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