Invoance Audit Logs vs WorkOS Audit Logs: An Honest Comparison
Both products record who did what in your customers' accounts, and both ship a portal, streaming, and exports. The fork in the road is what happens after an event is stored: WorkOS asks your customer to trust the record, Invoance signs it so they can check. A feature-by-feature and price-by-price comparison, with sources.
Two products, one job
If you sell B2B software, sooner or later a customer's security team asks to see who did what in their account. WorkOS Audit Logs and Invoance Audit Logs both answer that question the same way at the surface: an API for recording organization-scoped events, a portal your customers can open, streaming into their SIEM, and exports for their auditors.
The difference is what happens after an event is stored. WorkOS keeps a well-organized record and asks your customer to trust it. Invoance signs every event with a per-tenant Ed25519 key the moment it arrives, so your customer can verify the record independently: offline, against a public key bound to your domain, without trusting Invoance or you.
WorkOS is the category leader, and this comparison treats it that way. Every claim below about WorkOS comes from their public site and documentation as of July 2026 (sources linked at the end); every claim about Invoance comes from the shipped product.
What WorkOS Audit Logs give you
WorkOS positions Audit Logs as part of its enterprise-readiness platform alongside SSO, SCIM, and Directory Sync, and the feature set is mature. You define strongly-typed event schemas in the dashboard, with JSON schema validation catching malformed events at the edge. Events carry an action, actor, targets, context, and metadata. Your customers reach an Admin Portal through a private URL, logs export to CSV, and self-service log streams cover seven destination types: Datadog, Splunk, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Sentinel, Snowflake, and generic HTTPS. SDKs cover eight languages.
Published pricing is a la carte: $99 per month per million events stored, plus $125 per month per SIEM connection. And if you already run WorkOS for SSO and SCIM, Audit Logs slots into a vendor relationship and a dashboard you already have, which is a genuine advantage.
What Invoance Audit Logs give you
Invoance treats the audit log as evidence rather than storage. Every event is Ed25519-signed at ingestion with a per-tenant key and content-hashed with SHA-256. Events carry gap-free per-organization sequence numbers, so a record deleted from the middle of the log leaves a hole that the integrity-scan endpoint reports. Storage is append-only, with database triggers blocking updates and deletes at the engine level.
Around that core: a hosted portal your customers open from a one-time link (no accounts, no tickets), the same viewer available as an embeddable React component (@invoance/audit-viewer on npm) with signature verification running in the visitor's browser, HMAC-signed webhook streams to any HTTPS endpoint, asynchronous CSV and NDJSON exports in which every row keeps its per-event signature, and offline verification helpers in the Node and Python SDKs. Your tenant's public key is served at api.invoance.com/keys/yourdomain.com after DNS verification, so verification binds to your domain rather than to us. Zero-code integrations for Clerk and Auth0 can fill the log before you write a single emitter.
The core difference: who has to be trusted
WorkOS's public documentation, as of July 2026, does not describe cryptographic signing, tamper evidence, or any way for your customer to verify a stored event. That is not a knock on WorkOS; it is the industry default. Nearly every audit log, including the one you might build in-house, ultimately says: trust the database.
Invoance's design goal is that nobody has to. An auditor takes an exported event, recomputes its canonical bytes, and checks the Ed25519 signature against the public key published for your domain. Edits show, because the signature stops verifying. Mid-sequence deletions show, because the sequence numbers stop running gap-free. This works offline, works if Invoance is unreachable, and still works years after the event was recorded.
Key insight. Honest scope: this is detection, not prevention. Signing cannot stop someone from altering a record; it guarantees the alteration is visible. And if your customers never actually inspect their logs, a trusted store may genuinely be enough. The difference matters in the deals where the log has to stand up to someone whose job is to doubt it.
Schema philosophy, and an easy migration
WorkOS requires event schemas to be configured in the dashboard before you emit, and the type checking that buys is a real feature: malformed events get caught early. Invoance is schema-less by design: you never pre-register an event type. The ingest gate enforces a strict grammar instead: dot-separated lower-snake actions, flat scalar metadata capped at 50 keys with 40-character names and 500-character values, at most 20 targets, and a required idempotency key on every request.
If those limits sound familiar, they should. The Invoance event shape uses the same field names as WorkOS (action, occurred_at, actor, targets, context, metadata) and near-identical metadata constraints, deliberately. An emitter written for WorkOS maps field-for-field; migrating is mostly changing the endpoint and the API key. One behavioral difference worth noting: Invoance requires the idempotency key that WorkOS treats as optional, which is what makes at-least-once emitters safe by default.
Pricing: a la carte vs bundled tiers
WorkOS bills the two audit-log dimensions separately: $99 per month per million events stored and $125 per month per SIEM connection. Invoance bundles events, streams, retention, the portal, and the embeddable viewer into tiers: a free tier with 10,000 events per month, Builder at $149 per month (1 million events, 2 streams, 1 year retention), Growth at $399 (5 million events, 5 streams, 7 year retention), and Compliance at $2,499 (25 million events, 20 streams, 7 year retention with legal hold). Additional events cost $99 per million on any paid tier: the same marginal price WorkOS lists, except the events arrive signed.
Worked examples at list prices. At 1 million events with 2 SIEM connections, WorkOS comes to about $349 per month against Builder at $149. At 5 million events and 5 connections, about $1,120 against $399. At 25 million events and 20 connections, about $4,975 against $2,499. One structural note: WorkOS prices per million events stored, so longer retention grows the stored volume and the bill over time, while Invoance includes retention in the tier price.
Key insight. Prices were verified from the workos.com and invoance.com pricing pages in July 2026. Both can change; check the sources linked below rather than deciding on this article's numbers alone.
Where WorkOS is ahead
An honest comparison cuts both ways. WorkOS ships managed connectors for seven streaming destinations today; Invoance streams are HMAC-signed webhooks to any HTTPS endpoint, which reaches Datadog, Splunk, and most SIEMs through their HTTP intake, but you configure the receiving side yourself. WorkOS is one vendor for the whole enterprise-readiness surface: if you are buying SSO, SCIM, and Directory Sync anyway, consolidated procurement and a single dashboard are worth something real. And WorkOS has years of enterprise track record behind its uptime positioning, while Invoance is the younger product.
If none of your customers will ever verify a log, those advantages can reasonably decide it. The rest of this comparison exists for the deals where "can we trust this record" is an actual question in the security review.
How to choose
Choose WorkOS Audit Logs if you are standardized on WorkOS for identity, your customers accept a trusted store, and managed SIEM connectors matter more to you than verifiability. Choose Invoance if the audit log itself has to be evidence: regulated customers, AI systems that need provenance, legal exposure where a record's integrity will be challenged, or security teams that ask how you would know if a log entry changed.
Trying the claim costs nothing. The free tier includes 10,000 signed events a month, and if you already emit WorkOS-shaped events, the schema compatibility makes a side-by-side trial an afternoon of work.
- Invoance Audit Logs— Product overview: signing, portal, streams, exports, pricing.
- Audit logs quick start— First signed event in minutes, plus the Clerk and Auth0 integrations.
- WorkOS Audit Logs— WorkOS's product page, the source for their feature claims here.
- WorkOS Audit Logs documentation— Their event schema, admin portal, and log stream docs.
Signed, independently verifiable activity logs you can embed, stream, and export, one API call per event.
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