We performed a comparison between AWS Directory Service and Microsoft Entra ID based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Provides good performance and availability."
"The most valuable feature is ease of use."
"AWS has eliminated the downtime we waste when our on-premises resources go down."
"The most valuable feature of AWS Directory Service is cost-cutting features."
"The support is very good. I would rate the technical support as a nine out of ten."
"AWS Directory Service is secure."
"We like the fact that it's got such great redundancy."
"I like the manageability. Activate Connect makes it easier to assign information and to manage the resources in the network."
"The single sign-on across multiple platforms is really the true advantage here. That gives you one ID and password for access to all your systems. You don't need to manage a plethora of different user IDs and passwords to all the systems that you're going to access."
"It is one of those costs where you can't really quantify a return on investment. In the grand scheme of things, if we didn't have it, we would probably have a lot more breaches. It would be a lot harder to detect issues because we would have people using static usernames and passwords for various sites, making us open to a lot more attacks. The amount of security and benefit that we get out of it is not quantifiable but the return of investment from a qualitative point of view is much higher than not having it."
"Entra ID can be deployed using a hybrid model for organizations with a significant on-premises presence, or in a fully cloud-based setup for those that do not."
"The most valuable feature is the ease with which a person can log in remotely using only a password or pin without creating a profile or policy."
"The solution has come a long way. Now, with the Azure AD B2C offering integrated as well, we've got a full IAM-type solution for our customer-facing identity management. In addition, when it comes to user journeys we now can hook in custom flows for different credential checking and authorizations for specific conditional access."
"All of the features are amazing, such as identity governance and privileged identity management."
"The most valuable feature is the single sign-on, which allows any application that is SAML or OAuth compatible to use Azure as an identity provider for seamless sign-in."
"The central authentication server is most valuable. GPOs are useful for user and computer policies."
"I would like to grant partial access to a table contained in a database without having to provide full access to the whole database."
"We had a problem with the schema uploading and setting up the directory when we are migrating our users from on-premises to cloud infrastructure."
"To get CloudWatch to monitor your memory and storage, you have to do some configuration within your server, which sometimes results in errors."
"AWS could improve the number of regions. Azure has passed them. The ned more consistency, as far as the Northeast is concerned."
"Our only complaint is that you cannot integrate your Exchange server. Or, if you are planning to install an Exchange server on your Amazon EC2 instance, then you need to configure Active Directory on EC2 instance. We would like for this limitation to be lifted."
"The AWS Directory Service should be easier to integrate."
"Some of the security protocols are difficult to understand."
"The solution lacks certain features."
"The initial setup was complex."
"Adding a new account can be tricky."
"Azure AD needs to be more in sync. The synchronization can be time-consuming."
"We would like to have more granularity in the Azure conditional access in order to be able to manage more groups for devices and for applications."
"They have had a few outages, so stability is a little bit of an issue. It is global. That is the thing. I know some of the other competitors are regionalized ID platforms, but Entra ID is global, so when something goes wrong, it is a problem because it underpins everything, whether you are logging in to M365 or you have single sign-on to Azure, Autopilot, Intune, Exchange mailbox or another application. If there is a problem with Entra ID, all of that falls apart, so its great strength and weakness is the global single tenant for it. Stability is a key area for me. Otherwise, it is generally pretty good."
"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."
"I rate Microsoft support five out of 10. It's just okay."
"There are issues using it with ADFS."
AWS Directory Service is ranked 6th in Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) with 12 reviews while Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 1st in Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) with 190 reviews. AWS Directory Service is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AWS Directory Service writes "Extends AD identity and management capabilities to AWS resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Allows users to authenticate from home and has excellent integrations in a simple, stable solution". AWS Directory Service is most compared with Microsoft Entra External ID, Google Cloud Identity, Okta Workforce Identity, Omada Identity and SailPoint IdentityIQ, whereas Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, Yubico YubiKey, Cisco Duo and CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. See our AWS Directory Service vs. Microsoft Entra ID report.
See our list of best Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) vendors.
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