We performed a comparison between Microsoft Entra ID and Symantec Siteminder based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Access Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's a very scalable solution."
"Being able to easily authenticate yourself on the MSA app is valuable. It is easy to use. Rather than receiving a code in an SMS, you can just verify that it is you. You don't have to punch in any password or any six-digit code. That's the feature that I like the most."
"Using [Azure AD's] passwordless technology, you're not even using a password anymore. You're basically just creating a logon request without actually sending or typing or storing the password. This is awesome for any user, regardless of whether you're a factory worker or a CFO. It's secure and super-simple."
"It's very easy to run and it's part of their ecosystem and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon."
"The security and compliance features are very helpful. The online information on the site is well documented."
"Privileged Identity Management and Privileged Identity Management make controlling access considerably easier and ensure that authorized access is achieved."
"It is very simple. The Active Directory functions are very easy for us. Its integration with anything is very easy. We can easily do third-party multifactor authentication."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to deploy and make changes to every workstation that I need to. We use it to control policy and I can apply the right policies to all our 1,500 workstations, notebooks, et cetera."
"Right now, federation that comes out-of-the-box with single sign-on is the most valuable feature that we have, and also scalability."
"A valuable feature of Siteminder is the way it handles bulk traffic. The features it has, in terms of routing the traffic and load balancing, are good."
"I liked the debugging part. There are only two files (trace file and log file) that you need to look into while performing debugging, and the logs give you the exact info on where and what needs to be fixed."
"It is very scalable. We have a very large customer base: 75 million customers."
"IWA is an out-of-the-box feature. The SAML-based federation is standard for all tools. However, CA Single Sign-On has made the federation configuration way too simple and handy to set up and use."
"It has considerably reduced the amount of time that new users would take to join into the organization. Previously, it was a lengthy, manual process because it's a very secure environment, where they need to verify the user before they can actually grant him a user-ID and password. Integrating with the built-in custom application, and exposing CA Single Sign On to the internet, we were able to get the employees onboard. The time that we gained was: previously it would generally take from four to eight weeks for each employee, we brought it to one to two days."
"The Directory is secure. It's our user store, and it's important to keep our members safe. The product does well with that."
"If you look at our organization, and really all financial institutions, we have a lot of legacy apps. So it really helps to get Single Sign-On."
"The ease of use regarding finding audit information for users could also be improved."
"When you start to deal with legacy applications, provisioning is not as intuitive."
"Microsoft Authenticator can improve their notifications because sometimes, my team doesn't receive notifications about app updates and authentication failures."
"Tech support is inconsistent."
"Four years ago, we had an issue with Azure AD. We wanted to reverse sync from Azure AD to on-prem Active Directory, but we couldn't achieve this. Azure AD could connect only in one way, for example, from your site to Azure. If you needed to do the reverse and connect from Azure to on-prem, there was no way to achieve it. We asked Microsoft, and they told us that they don't support it."
"The solution has not saved costs. While we’ve eliminated some tools, there are some other features that we are dependent on as admin, which are not yet integrated with Azure AD."
"The monitoring dashboard could be a bit better."
"I would like to see Microsoft communicate how they intend to manage legacy applications. Right now, you still have to deploy a hosted domain server (which comes at an extra cost) if you have a legacy application that cannot sync properly with the enterprise applications and the modern applications."
"In future releases, I would like to see maybe more capabilities with some more modern authentication."
"The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live."
"We are finding some compatibility issues. We're still working with CA on them."
"I think they need to integrate some of the newer types of authentication into the product. I'm not seeing the innovation when it comes to biometrics in the product."
"To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly."
"I'd like to see a rework of the user directory configuration."
"I would like to see a move towards the newer technologies, which is what we are doing right now. I think that's in the roadmap that's coming, in the 12.8 and 14 releases, but we would like to have it sooner than later."
"The GUIs are not very clear, especially when integrating with other products from CA."
Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 1st in Access Management with 190 reviews while Symantec Siteminder is ranked 12th in Access Management with 69 reviews. Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6, while Symantec Siteminder is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Allows users to authenticate from home and has excellent integrations in a simple, stable solution". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Siteminder writes "Easy to implement and customize and very stable". Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Cisco Duo and Yubico YubiKey, whereas Symantec Siteminder is most compared with PingFederate, ForgeRock, Okta Workforce Identity, PingAccess and Auth0. See our Microsoft Entra ID vs. Symantec Siteminder report.
See our list of best Access Management vendors and best Single Sign-On (SSO) vendors.
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