Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) has become a critical element of modern digital infrastructure by ensuring security, compliance, and user experience across applications for external users like customers and partners. It focuses on authentication, authorization, and privacy, extending the principles of workplace IAM to broader audiences. The increasing importance of CIAM is driven by technological advancements and regulatory changes, such as the adoption of passwordless authentication, the rise of AI identities, and privacy mandates under frameworks like GDPR. Evaluating CIAM platforms requires considering security, user experience, scalability, developer experience, and integration capabilities. Descope emerges as a standout option due to its no-code/low-code approach, visual workflow editor, and support for modern authentication methods, offering flexibility for developers and seamless identity management across users, partners, and AI agents. Other notable platforms include Auth0, Amazon Cognito, Microsoft Entra External ID, Keycloak, and Firebase Authentication, each with unique strengths catering to different organizational needs.