When engineering teams evaluate identity infrastructure, they tend to focus on features, pricing, and security certifications. Those all matter. But there’s another signal worth paying attention to: where the market is actually moving.
G2’s Winter 2026 CIAM Momentum Grid measures exactly that. It tracks which platforms are gaining adoption and customer satisfaction in real time, based on verified user reviews and year-over-year growth signals. FusionAuth landed in the Leaders quadrant — the top 25% of vendors evaluated.
What The Momentum Grid Measures
Unlike traditional analyst reports that weigh market share and brand recognition, the Momentum Grid focuses on forward-looking indicators. Satisfaction scores reflect verified customer reviews, review quality and recency, product and admin experience, and net promoter scores. Momentum scores factor in employee growth, review growth, web traffic growth, and social growth.
Together, these dimensions surface a different kind of signal: not which platforms have been around the longest, but which ones teams are choosing now.
Why Momentum Matters
Authentication sits at the center of your application stack. It touches every user interaction, every deployment, and every compliance requirement. Choosing an identity platform is a long-term infrastructure decision, not something you swap out every quarter.
For that kind of decision, momentum is a useful complement to technical evaluation. It reflects where engineering talent is being invested, where adoption is accelerating, and which platforms are earning repeat confidence from the teams using them.
A platform that scores well on both satisfaction and momentum suggests something specific: teams that adopt it tend to stay, and more teams are adopting it over time. For leadership evaluating strategic risk, that pattern is a meaningful data point alongside your own security and compliance reviews.
What’s Driving the Shift?
FusionAuth’s placement ahead of both legacy and newer CIAM providers — including Auth0, Ping Identity, WorkOS, Frontegg, and Descope — reflects a broader shift in what engineering teams prioritize when evaluating identity platforms.
Teams want their engineering hours back. When auth systems require constant maintenance, patching, and workarounds, those hours come directly out of feature development. The satisfaction scores in the Momentum Grid are driven in part by developer experience — how quickly teams can integrate, how much ongoing effort the platform demands, and whether engineers can focus on core product work instead of identity plumbing.
Deployment flexibility and data control matter more than ever. As compliance requirements grow — from GDPR to emerging regulations like the EU’s Digital Services Act and Cyber Resilience Act — teams need identity infrastructure they can deploy on their own terms. Cloud, on-prem, hybrid, air-gapped — the ability to control where your data lives and how your infrastructure runs is becoming a baseline requirement, not a nice-to-have. Platforms that offer that control are earning adoption accordingly.
Predictable costs reduce organizational risk. Identity infrastructure with opaque or usage-based pricing creates budget uncertainty that compounds over time. Engineering leaders and their executive counterparts are increasingly choosing platforms where the cost model is clear from day one, eliminating surprises as user counts grow or requirements evolve.
What this means for your evaluation
Whether you’re maintaining a homegrown auth system, weighing a migration from an existing provider, or scoping identity requirements for the first time, third-party market signals like the Momentum Grid offer context that’s hard to get from vendor conversations alone.
Momentum reports surface category shifts early — often before traditional analyst rankings catch up. They tell you which platforms are gaining trust from verified users, not just which ones have the biggest marketing budgets.
Get the full report
The complete G2 Winter 2026 CIAM Momentum Grid includes detailed scoring, vendor positioning, and comparison data across the category.
If you’re evaluating identity platforms — or starting to question whether your current approach will scale with your compliance, security, and product requirements — this report provides useful third-party context alongside your technical reviews.
