Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and Okta are leading IAM solutions with different strengths. Entra ID is praised for its seamless integration with Microsoft products like Office 365 and Azure, focusing on Active Directory integration, user lifecycle management and conditional access. Entra ID's customizable options and reliable performance are highly valued. Okta is platform-agnostic, streamlining access management processes, praised for its user-friendly interface, competitive pricing and exceptional customer service.
The summary above is based on 141 interviews we conducted recently with Okta Workforce Identity and Microsoft Entra ID users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The most valuable components of the solution are provisioning and deprovisioning since both features work...Microsoft Entra Verified ID is a very stable solution."
"We have a history of all our authentications and excellent integration with the Microsoft solutions we use at our company. It runs smoothly in Windows and macOS."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is its authentication security. That is Azure Active Directory's purpose - making cloud services' security and integration easier."
"Microsoft Entra ID's valuable features include integration capabilities, a simplified Active Directory approach, scalability, conditional access, and privileged identity management."
"We can centralize and manage everything much more effectively with this tool."
"It can be used to grant access at a granular level. It provides secure access and many ways to offer security to your user resources. It provides a good level of security for any access on Azure. It gives you options like multi-factor authentication where apart from your password, you can use other factors for authentication, such as a code is sent to your phone or the authenticator app that you can use login."
"Overall, I think the support and the pictorial format of this web portal are very good."
"What I like is that I can go anywhere, at any time, and to any client premise, and I can simply log in to the admin panel and can serve any of my clients."
"Having a single sign-on to all our applications."
"A solution that's easy to use, stable, and reliable."
"It's reliable and it does what it is advertised to do."
"The feature that is most valuable to me is the automated user provisioning that we set up using Okta as a major part of that process."
"The tool helps improve our security and productivity."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The solution can scale very well."
"It is dependent on the evolution of your user base. It depends on usage per user, so the more sign-ins there are, the more expensive it becomes, so it works best for smaller companies from a financial perspective."
"The support could be better. Lately, they sort of dropped off a bit in terms of quality."
"The permission management is a mess."
"I want better integration between Azure AD and the on-prem environment because there are currently limitations that can hamper employee experience. We use a feature called password writeback, that can be challenging to implement in a hybrid environment. Employees can change their passwords using a self-service password reset (SSPR) feature, which reflects from the cloud to the on-prem identity, but not the other way around. Currently, there is no way to reflect passwords from on-prem identities to the cloud."
"The role-based access control can be improved. Normally, the role-based access control has different privileges. Each role, such as administrator or user, has different privileges, and the setup rules for them should be defined automatically rather than doing it manually."
"The product needs to improve its support."
"When we add some user groups, at times they will not be properly configured. Also, sometimes Azure AD is not aware of the group policy, like the control, device functions, and settings, in detail. For example, you cannot configure these settings through mobile devices. It doesn't provide the flexibility to do that. The other challenge is that a third-party application may provide access without authorization."
"Microsoft has so many different requirements and priorities that sometimes they don't invest all their energy into the products that you have expectations to investigate."
"We have a lot of freedom in using the Group Policy Objects and, although Group Policy Objects are part of Azure Active Directory, there are still a lot of things that can be improved, such as providing local admin rights to a user. There are various, easy ways that I can do that in the on-premises version, but in the cloud version, it is a bit difficult. You have to create a bunch of policies to make it work."
"I would appreciate it if Okta Workforce Identity becomes more user-friendly. Its API technology is complicated. Certain applications may pose challenges in terms of integration, especially when they require IDP technologies that aren't easily codable. While I can't provide specific examples, some applications may not integrate with Okta Workforce Identity."
"The product is expensive compared to other tools."
"We experienced some technical glitches that need to be resolved."
"RESTful Web Service calls and their response seem a bit slow."
"Okta Workforce Identity can improve by having more features in governance."
"The solution is very expensive."
"The product does not offer enough integration capabilities."
"The pricing could be improved."
Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 1st in Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) with 190 reviews while Okta Workforce Identity is ranked 2nd in Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) with 59 reviews. Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6, while Okta Workforce Identity is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Saves us time and money and features Conditional Access policies, SSPR, and MFA". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Okta Workforce Identity writes "Extremely easy to work with, simple to set up, and reasonably priced ". Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Cisco Duo and Yubico YubiKey, whereas Okta Workforce Identity is most compared with Google Cloud Identity, SailPoint IdentityIQ, Saviynt, Auth0 and IBM Security Verify Access. See our Microsoft Entra ID vs. Okta Workforce Identity report.
See our list of best Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) vendors, best Single Sign-On (SSO) vendors, and best Authentication Systems vendors.
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