We performed a comparison between BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Remote Access solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's a stable product. Based on the demos and interaction with it, it was stable."
"Its security, simplicity, and ease of deployment and maintenance are the most valuable. It is FIPS compliant, so it goes through severe penetration testing every one year or two years. They have to maintain this compliance. It is very safe. Customers have been using it in the last eight years because of the simplicity of getting it deployed quickly. Most of the people using the solution had been hacked already, so they needed it quickly. As compared to the other solutions in the market, it can be turned on in production very quickly. You don't really need to have a server. It can be deployed very rapidly on VMware or Hyper-V, and you don't need to do an installation. It is a kind of an all-included package that you just deploy in a VM environment. It is basically a VM that is specifically built for a customer. The way the PRA data solutions work is that you need to build them for each customer because of being hard-coded with their SSL certificate, their web page name, and all that."
"We like the integration with Active Directory. It allows us to discover the endpoints and user accounts that need protection. It's a good way of securing our privileged access."
"The project goal was to allow staff to run applications with admin privileges without being admins, which was the product's most important feature."
"We can truly elevate our admin rights while we're in there to fully take control of a system and manage it as if it was sitting right here on our desk. Most of the organization has gone to remote work or work from home. With that being the case, this solution allows us to be able to still work with our end-users, even though they're not always sitting on our network."
"PRA stands on its own as a full solution. This is important because it reduces the need to maintain a lot of different services. Also, the integration between those services are sometimes not easy to maintain. So, having a solution like BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access reducing our workload gives us enough time to work on our other issues. The system just runs and does what it is supposed to do."
"One of the features that I really like about it is the ability to set a start date, time, and end date for the access. For example, you can set the access for a person from tomorrow, Monday, or Tuesday and ending on a specific period of the day or a specific date. That's really quite helpful."
"I like the enterprise credential manager. It's a connector that sits in PRA and tests the credentials for the end user with a process that will clean the password. This is one of PRA's primary features and simplifies user onboarding. There aren't many restrictions or complications. We can add the user while only opening one port, which is more than enough to access the PRA server. Every organization requires only four critical servers out of a hundred and some 50 production servers."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is managing the remote desktop end user or remote server."
"The most valuable feature is performance."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The solution is user-friendly and has a good user experience."
"The most valuable feature is that it gives me full accessibility to my servers."
"In terms of the valuable features, I like the profile, the new version is really good."
"It's largely stable."
"Installing Microsoft Desktop Services is straightforward."
"Multiple areas can be improved. We've seen lots of updates in the past year. They have a portal where we can submit our ideas. BeyondTrust is immediately implementing user suggestions. The UI could be more informative. Initially, there were two or three connectors, and now we have five or six. It would be nice if they added a few more connectors for third-party integration. There are multiple tools, but the clients may require more for their convenience."
"One of our gaps or pain points is having multi-factor authentication at the endpoint and using the PRA password injection from BeyondTrust, which does not work in our environment. We can only have MFA at the login of BeyondTrust to check out the password. Therefore, we can't meet our security requirements of having it on the endpoint."
"In terms of the ability to automate the creation of new accounts within it, it's still a bit laborious."
"I would love to have a web console and the ability to use the smart card with the web console to provide remote support. If you are on a computer that doesn't have the Bomgar console, you should be able to use the web console to provide support. That's the only thing right now. A web console is nice when you're jumping into a computer, but if you need to elevate the privileges, you currently can't do it with the smart card. If they could figure that out, that would be money."
"The integration client, backup solution, and SSO setup and provisioning could be improved. There isn't any documented or supported user provisioning currently, which slows down the processes of onboarding and assigning permissions. I would like to see this improved soon."
"At the moment, I don't see any major problems with it. If anything, they can just change the look and feel of the login screen because it looks too simple to me. It does not have so much information. When you get to the login screen of the solution, you should have more information. We also have BeyondTrust Remote Support, and the login page looks similar to BeyondTrust Privilege Remote Access. I would love to see more rich information on the login screen or landing page so that rather than having a regular sign-in screen or page where you just provide a username and password and get into the solution, you should have more insight into what the solution does. I've mentioned this to them every time I have had an opportunity."
"When doing protocol panel jumps, the tool does not restrict what is recorded on the user's computer."
"Changing your password should be simplified, and there should not be a charge for it."
"The price is too high."
"We face frequent disconnections."
"Sometimes, the updates break the system."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is its security and simple configuration."
"The biggest reason we don't use the solution for our company's clients is the solution's prices."
"I would like to see a web-based interface, instead of client installation to refresh the UI through HTML."
"The DB card needs improvement. I have a lot of experience with other competitors and Citrix is better than VMware and Microsoft. Citrix has more extensive features."
"There have been some network issues in the solution. So, when we used to connect it, the solution suddenly got disconnected. So the network part needs to be improved."
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BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access is ranked 6th in Remote Access with 21 reviews while Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is ranked 2nd in Remote Access with 76 reviews. BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access writes "Our support team can do so much more without having to actively engage our customers, which saves us time and money". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services writes "Easy to set up and reliable, but needs an additional control panel". BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access is most compared with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service), WALLIX Bastion, BeyondTrust Remote Support and F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), whereas Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is most compared with TeamViewer, VMware Horizon, Citrix Workspace, VMware Workstation and Parallels Access. See our BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access vs. Microsoft Remote Desktop Services report.
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