B2B SaaS Authentication: Auth, RBAC & Enterprise SSO

December 30, 2025

In our last post, we introduced Baseplate as an application framework for rapidly building B2B SaaS applications. The first aspect of Baseplate we wanted to explore is B2B SaaS authentication and access foundations. Baseplate ships them as standard layers: authentication, role-based access control, and enterprise SSO patterns buyers expect from day one.

Why B2B SaaS Authentication Is a Tier-One Feature

Enterprise buyers are NOT going to ask about your roadmap first. Your first questions will be something like:

  • “Can we use SSO?”
  • “How do you handle role-based access?”
  • “How do you support tenant isolation?”
  • “What happens when someone leaves the company?”

These are tier-one features and requirements for selling an app to any business, and they scale with company size. Robust B2B SaaS authentication is non-negotiable and only becomes more critical with company size.

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B2B SaaS Authentication Built on Supabase

Baseplate’s user authentication model is built on top of the extensive authentication support provided by Supabase, the backend-as-a-service provider we rely on. That gets you a variety of things “out of the box.” 

  • Fast signup and login for end users,
  • Support for third-party federated logins – Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a dozen more,
  • Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO),
  • OAuth 2 support

These authentication processes are integrated with standard user provisioning and deprovisioning, so access updates automatically when someone changes roles or leaves. This comprehensive B2B SaaS authentication approach ensures enterprise buyers get the security features they require.

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Enterprise SSO: SAML and OIDC for B2B SaaS Authentication

Baseplate supports the two most common enterprise SSO protocols:

  • SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language)
  • OIDC (OpenID Connect)

If you’ve dealt with enterprise identity teams, that pairing won’t surprise you. Virtually all identity providers will support a flavor of those or OAuth2. Strong B2B SaaS authentication, paired with granular RBAC, provides the foundation enterprises demand.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for B2B SaaS

Baseplate ships with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) that is divided into two buckets of roles:

  • System Standard Roles are global, non-editable, canonical roles in the system.   They occur in every SaaS company we’ve ever worked at, including System Administrator, Customer Success, and Customer Administrator.   We support these out of the box with relevant scopes for each.
  • Rich Roles are persona-driven roles that extend beyond permissions into contextual personalization.   These allow you to define additional roles with deep profiles that can be used in LLM prompting to generate dynamic interfaces and messages within the system.

If you don’t have a clear role model, you will invent one under pressure—with production incidents as your teacher.  We give you a clear, industry-standard one from day one.