---
title: User Identities
description: "Read more about the concept of user identities in Infisical."
---

## Concept

A **user identity** (also known as **user**) represents a developer, admin, or any other human entity interacting with resources in Infisical. 

Users can be added manually (through Web UI) or programmatically (e.g., API) to [organizations](../organization) and [projects](../projects). 

Upon being added to an organizaztion and projects, users assume a certain set of roles and permissions that represents their identity. 

![organization members](../../images/platform/organization/organization-members.png)

## Authentication methods

To interact with various resources in Infisical, users are able to utilize a number of authentication methods: 
- **Email & Password**: the most common authentication method that is used for authentication into Web Dashboard and Infisical CLI. It is recommended to utilize [Multi-factor Authentication](/documentation/platform/mfa) in addition to it.  
- **Service Tokens**: Service tokens allow users authenticate into CLI and other clients under their own identity. For the majority of use cases, it is not a recommended approach. Instead, it is often a good idea to utilize [Machine Identities](./machine-identities) with [Universal Authentication](/documentation/platform/identities/universal-auth). 
- **SSO**: Infisical natively integrates with a number of SSO identity providers like [Google](/documentation/platform/sso/google), [GitHub](/documentation/platform/sso/github), and [GitLab](/documentation/platform/sso/gitlab). 
- **SAML SSO**: It is also possible to set up SAML SSO integration with identity providers like [Okta](/documentation/platform/sso/okta), [Microsoft Entra ID](/documentation/platform/sso/azure) (formerly known as Azure AD), [JumpCloud](/documentation/platform/sso/jumpcloud), [Google](/documentation/platform/sso/google-saml), and more. 
- **LDAP**: For organizations with more advanced needs, Infisical also provides user authentication with [LDAP](/documentation/platform/ldap/overview) that includes a number of LDAP providers.