We performed a comparison between Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Azure Active Directory is the preferred solution over F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager due to its advanced security features, customizable options, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. While F5 BIG-IP APM is noted for its reliability and stability, it is considered complex and costly, with room for improvement in reporting and management. Azure AD offers a more feature-rich solution with better integration options and a user-friendly management interface, along with a free basic tier and flexible pricing options, making it a better value for the money compared to F5 BIG-IP APM.
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"In my opinion, the GUI is perfect with the configuration options provided. F5 BIG-IP has given customization options and policy configuration tools in the GUI. It's good and good enough to work."
"The tool is reliable and easy to configure."
"F5 BIG-IP APM is relatively easy to use."
"Stickiness is the most valuable feature of the product."
"The product allows us to create customized portals for your users."
"The performance of the solution is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the virtual IP creation. It's our most frequently used feature."
"Privileged Identity Management and Privileged Identity Management make controlling access considerably easier and ensure that authorized access is achieved."
"It enhanced our end user experience quite a bit. Instead of the days of having to contact the service desk with challenges for choosing their password, users can go in and do it themselves locally, regardless of where they are in the world. This has certainly made it a better experience accessing their applications. Previously, a lot of times, they had to remember multiple usernames and passwords for different systems. This solution brings it all together, using a single sign-on experience."
"If a company has hundreds of users that already exist in the cloud, and it now wants to enable those same users to be present in third-party applications that their business uses, like Atlassian or GoToMeeting, the provisioning technology can assist in achieving that."
"The solution offers business to business and client to business support."
"The most valuable feature is the factor identification. I find that it is natural integration, and it is just a natural step. I do not need to do anything else."
"The most important things of Azure Active Directory are the security and the facility to manage all the services and users. It is very easy to manage users and assign roles, permissions, and access. At the same time, it is a very secure environment. Microsoft takes security very seriously. They take care of all the security and all the factors to prevent any kind of data or information compromise."
"With Azure Conditional Access you can specify network locations where you want some of the services in the organization to be available to users, and where you don't want users to have access."
"The valuable features I use daily are enterprise application, conditional access, identity governance, password monitoring, and a password reset."
"The initial setup was complex."
"Cloud services are something that F5 Access Policy Manager could do better"
"Integrating identity providers and single sign-on solutions can simplify user authentication and access control."
"The price of this product can be improved."
"The solution is quite costly."
"F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager has room for improvement in integration with other products."
"I'd suggest improved documentation integration directly within the GUI. Right now, finding comprehensive documentation often requires going to external websites like the community portal."
"The solution’s GUI looks very old."
"The Cloud Provisioning Agent cannot provision a lot of the information that AD Connect does. For starters, the lightweight version cannot synchronize device information. If you have computers on-premises, the information about them will not be synchronized by the Cloud Provisioning Agent. In addition, if you have a user on the cloud and he changes his password, that information should be written back to the on-premises instance. But that workflow cannot be done with the lightweight agent. It can only be done with the more robust version."
"Azure AD provides two types of features. One is Azure AD Excel and is already B2C. Out of both versions, Azure B2C requires some improvement, in terms of user management and role management, et cetera."
"Everything should be in one package. There are so many different packages. They need to provide guidance because there are so many features and we don't know how to implement them in our organization."
"The most challenging aspect I found was the creation of organizational units and specific domains. They have a tool called Bastion, which is expensive and a little bit confusing."
"The synchronization between my AD and Azure AD needs improvement."
"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 needs to add a single setup, so whenever resources join the company or are leaving the company, all of the changes can be made with a single click."
"Microsoft is working with Microsoft Identity Manager for Active Directory on-premise. It will be very important to have these identity management solutions directly in Azure Active Directory. It's very important to have some kind of Azure identity manager as a technology for identity and access management for working both in the cloud and inside the Azure suite."
More F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) Pricing and Cost Advice →
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is ranked 5th in Access Management with 13 reviews while Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 1st in Access Management with 190 reviews. F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) writes " Facilitates packet inspection, modification, and offloading and offers visibility and troubleshooting capabilities, allowing for pre-production server testing". 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". F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is most compared with Citrix Gateway, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Ivanti Connect Secure, Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) and Aruba ClearPass, whereas Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Cisco Duo and Okta Workforce Identity. See our F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) vs. Microsoft Entra ID report.
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