Obelisk vs Descope, honestly
Descope's Agentic Identity Hub manages identities for headless agents, scope-based agent access to backend APIs and step-up auth for sensitive agent actions. (source, checked 2026-10-02) Obelisk is a passkey-first identity and security plane built around one idea: security you can prove, not just promise. This page compares the two fairly — Descope is a genuinely good product for teams adding identity for autonomous agents and MCP servers beside the user authentication they already run, and we say so plainly below.
The short version: if your agents need tokens of their own today, Descope issues them and Obelisk does not (see the table). Obelisk's distinct piece is the record: agent lifecycle events go to a hash-chained ledger whose inclusion proofs need no account to fetch, and an agent can publish a Proof Link that anyone can read. See the full field →
Where Descope shines
Autonomous agents with no delegating user can authenticate themselves and receive scoped, policy-backed access. (source, checked 2026-10-02) A person can approve elevated agent tasks out of band over CIBA, and standalone MCP auth works without replacing your existing user authentication. (source, checked 2026-10-02)
Side-by-side: Obelisk vs Descope
Obelisk's column says what Obelisk does today, including what it does not do. Every Descope cell is drawn from the page it links, checked on the date shown; vendor capabilities change, so verify the latest from their docs.
| Dimension | Obelisk | Descope |
|---|---|---|
| Agent as an identity | Each agent is its own record in Agent Studio: its own key, held by the agent's runtime (Obelisk never receives the private key), a passkey-holding owner, and an opt-in public Proof Link that is opaque and revocable. | Manages identities for headless agents. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Tokens issued to an agent | No grant issues a token to an agent on its own: the token endpoint grants only authorization_code and refresh_token. There is no client-credentials, token-exchange or ID-JAG grant. | Yes: autonomous agents authenticate themselves and receive scoped, policy-backed access. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Delegated access | An agent can name a parent agent of the same owner (no cycles, limited depth), and revocation follows that chain. There is no on-behalf-of token exchange. | OAuth Token Exchange flows govern delegated access to APIs and MCP servers. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Human approval of agent actions | The owner approves an agent's enrolment from a passkey session. There is no CIBA or per-action approval flow. | Out-of-band approval over CIBA (email, push) grants agents time-bound tokens for elevated scopes. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| MCP authorization | An MCP authorization server: OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, audience-bound tokens (RFC 8707), issuer-tagged responses (RFC 9207) and client ID metadata documents. | Standalone MCP auth and consent, usable without changing your existing user authentication. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
| Third-party check of agent authorization | Registering, approving, transferring or revoking an agent writes a receipt to Obelisk's hash-chained ledger. Anyone holding a receipt's hash can fetch its position in the chain and a Merkle inclusion proof at /api/proof/<hash>, with no account. | Token Exchange flows “with clear attribution and audits for agents”. The cited release describes no proof a third party could check without Descope. (source, checked 2026-10-02) |
Why teams choose Obelisk
The differences below aren't cosmetic — they're structural choices that move security from "trust us" to "verify it."
- Agent identities with public Proof Links. Agents enroll with their own runtime-held key (Obelisk never receives it), a passkey-holding owner stays accountable, and anyone can inspect the bounded live evidence at an opaque, revocable proof link. Reading a Proof Link needs no Obelisk account.
- Tamper-evident, hash-chained receipts. Every sign-in, token, and grant emits a hash-chained receipt, anchored under an ES256-signed tree head you can check against our published JWKS. The chain can't be quietly rewritten, so the audit trail is something you can verify, not just trust.
- Sender-bound tokens (DPoP, RFC 9449). Access tokens can be bound to a client-held P-256 key with a per-request signed proof — a leaked token replayed without the key is inert. Bearer theft, the agent era's dominant token threat, simply stops working.
- CAEP / Shared Signals propagation. Revocations and credential changes reach relying parties as signed Security Event Tokens — push or poll — instead of waiting for the next token refresh to notice.
- A live public MCP tool server. Obelisk answers trust questions to the software that increasingly does the checking: read-only MCP tools at
POST /mcp, rate-limited and account-free — the same checks a human runs on the website, callable by any assistant.
Together these make the login the strongest part of your stack, with a posture anyone can check. See the full trust case →
Frequently asked questions
Is Obelisk a Descope alternative?
For human sign-in and agent records, partly. For agent tokens, no: Obelisk has no self-authenticating agent token, no token exchange and no CIBA approval today, and Descope's hub has all three. Obelisk gives each agent a record with its own key and an opt-in public Proof Link, and it writes agent lifecycle events to a hash-chained ledger; anyone holding a receipt's hash can fetch its inclusion proof.
Does Obelisk support token exchange or CIBA for agents?
No. No grant issues a token to an agent on its own: the token endpoint grants only authorization_code and refresh_token. There is no client-credentials, token-exchange or ID-JAG grant. The owner approves an agent's enrolment from a passkey session. There is no CIBA or per-action approval flow.
See it for yourself
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