title: Difference between adfs and azure AD
body: <p>Differences between ADFS and Azure AD</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>I understand that ADFS is a STS (Secure Token Service) in the sense that it issues tokens to applications that helps applications establish user identity. At an organization level, our org uses ADFS with WS-Federation protocol to authenticate users across all internal application of organization and also implement SSO.</p></li>
  <li><p>Also in our organization we have Azure AD account, and I have used Azure AD to register our custom apps, and whenever an unauthenticated user enters our app, the person will redirected to azure ad login page and will have to authenticate himself. After successful authentication Azure AD also issues token(ID Token, access token, Refresh Token) </p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>My question is that can I consider Azure AD also a type of STS (Secure Token Service) just like ADFS because it issues tokens to establish client identity?</p>