One Identity Active Roles vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between One Identity Active Roles and Symantec Siteminder based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two User Provisioning Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed One Identity Active Roles vs. Symantec Siteminder Report (Updated: March 2020).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Another good feature is the change history. It's centralized in a single place and allows us to manage people's Active Directory domains from a central location. We can also drill down into individual objects in a troubleshooting or even an auditing situation. We can show evidence to auditors by drilling down into the individual history. It gives you all the history of what happened around an individual object. That is something that would be almost impossible to do in Active Directory, or extremely complicated.""The biggest thing for us is Active Roles saves a lot of man-hours in keeping groups up-to-date manually or trying to write some sort of script that you have to run, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Instead of when every time somebody joins a department, then somebody has to remember to put in a request to add "meet user Joe" to this group, the solution does it automatically for us. Therefore, it saves our business and IT staff time because they do not have to process requests since Active Role can do it for them.""The solution is stable.""With the use of the sync service we were able to import information from multiple external systems and populate them within our space and leverage them for downstream systems.""In comparison to native Active Directory tools, using Active Roles for delegation is so much better. It uses an access template and that makes it easy to see who can access what. In fact, you can do that for many objects as well.""Because of Active Roles, we're able to synchronize on an even more regular basis. It enables us to provide even more information to the Active Directory, which helped us to group our users in a more consistent manner.""It's valuable to us in that it resembles the native tools that most people have grown accustomed to... Active Roles resembles traditional tools, such as from Microsoft. That is really good because it eases the way people interact with the tool.""Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome."

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"The solution is easy to use for our managers.""Ease of use is very good, for administrating it. It's very well known.""Federation is valuable, for sure, because we have a lot of third-party vendors that we need to integrate with, and this is a turnkey solution in some ways.""Authentication & Authorization are important because all the sites need authentication for security purposes. That has been handled pretty well all these years with SSO.""SAML is the best thing we're using right now because there is no need for creating an external account.""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 most valuable feature is that it meets the requirements of the customer. You have a lot of features in the product. Every product has them, but the question is, are these products going to meet the requirement of the customer?""We almost never have outages nor see slowdowns."

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Cons
"The third area for improvement, which is the weakest portion of ARS, is the workflow engine, which was introduced a few years ago. It's slow and not very intuitive to use, so I would like to see improvement there.""For the AAD management feature, it needs to improve the objects that we can manage and the security.""The ability to send logs to a SIEM would be very beneficial.""The user and group management in Azure AD could be better. Our focus these days is dynamic sharing with several on-prem Microsoft applications like SharePoint.""The solution needs an attestation process that includes certification and recertification attestation.""The initial setup was quite easy, but it was time-consuming. It took about three months.""For ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript.""Another issue we have with the product is that we run a lot of custom tasks. You have to program them to run on one particular host and there's no automatic failover to a second host. If that host is down when a task is supposed to run, it has to wait until the next time it runs when that host is up."

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"To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly.""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.""The main thing is we do not have the traceability and good monitoring that CA can provide us to capture problems when they occur.""The technical support could be better.""The initial setup was complex, painful. But that is to be expected of any new setup. When you're a big bank like us, any kind of migration to a new product is hard. I expect it to be painful, and it was painful. But it's not something that you can avoid.""The tech support has not been very good for us so we don't use them anymore. We have had some issues. Nobody is perfect.""They need to make configurations easier, and not have the engineer having to guess what will happen when he changes a particular setting.""As we are moving in to the mobility space, this is where we really see SiteMinder and their other product really come together to provide a solution base to a different area where the IoT is coming, the different business communications are happening. All of those things require authentication and we really want to see this product grow into that role."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
  • "The price is reasonable. It costs us about 1 million Danish kroner annually, and we also spend about half as much on consultants."
  • "The pricing is on the higher end."
  • "It's fairly priced."
  • "It's expensive."
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  • "The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
  • "I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
  • "CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
  • "Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
  • "The licensing is fair for this solution."
  • "Siteminder is a little costly. You pay for licensing, and they offer packages, so if you have less users, then you have to buy different products at different prices. If you have more of a user base, then the package is different. They also include other features—for example, if you have a database and you're using Siteminder, then it's good to use a Semantic-specific database, but if you are using less, then you have to purchase the database separately. Whereas if you are going for a bigger license, then it comes within the package. It depends on which plan you are using."
  • More Symantec Siteminder Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution is fairly priced. That said, I have nothing to compare it to.
    Top Answer:The solution has not enabled us to reduce password reset times. It has not automated provisioning. The group attestation could be improved. It was a feature that was available in version 5. You can… more »
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    Also Known As
    Quest Active Roles
    Single Sign-On, SiteMinder, CA SSO, Layer7 SiteMinder
    Learn More
    Overview

    One Identity Active Roles is a highly regarded solution for Active Directory (AD) security and account management. One Identity Active Roles will enhance group, account, and directory management while eradicating the need for manual processes. The end result is a significant increase in the overall speed, efficiency, and security of the organization.

    Using One Identity Active Roles, users can:

    • Easily increase and strengthen native attributes of Active Directory (AD) and Azure AD.

    • Quickly unify and automate group and account management while protecting and securing critical administrative access.

    • Free up valuable resources to concentrate on other IT tasks, fully confident that your user permissions, critical data, and privileged access are safe and secure.

    Managing accounts in AD and Azure AD can be tremendously challenging; continually keeping these important systems safe and secure presents an even greater challenge. Traditional tools can be inefficient, error-prone, and very disjointed. In today’s robust marketplace, organizations are finding it somewhat difficult to keep pace with the constant access changes in a hybrid AD ecosystem. Additionally, there are significant security issues to consider (government compliance, employee status/access changes, and other confidential business requirements). And, of course, there is a requirement to properly manage Active Directory and Azure Active Directory access in addition to managing all the other numerous SaaS and non-Windows applications that organizations use today.

    Users can easily automate all of these tedious, mundane administrative tasks, keeping their systems safe and error-free. Active Roles ensures users can perform their job responsibilities more effectively, more efficiently, and with minimal manual intervention. Active Roles was created with a flexible design, so organizations can easily scale to meet your organizational needs, today, tomorrow, and in the foreseeable future.

    Reviews from Real Users

    A PeerSpot user who is a Network Analyst at a government tells us, “It has eliminated admin tasks that were bogging down our IT department. Before we started using Active Roles, if one of our frontline staff members deleted a user or group, it could take several hours to try to reverse that mistake. Whereas now, the most our frontline staff can do is a deprovision, which just disables everything in the background, but it's still there. We can go in and have it back the way it was two minutes later. Instead of it taking two hours, it only takes two minutes.

    Becky P., Sr Business Analyst at George Washington University, shares, “In addition, with the use of workflows and the scheduled tasks, we were able to automate and centrally manage a number of the processes as well as utilize them to work around other product limitations. Those include, but are not limited to syncing larger groups, which have 50,000 plus members, to Azure AD. We sync up to Azure AD using ARS. If we had not already had ARS in place, it would have been impossible for us to have done so in the time period we did it in. We did it in under six months. ARS probably saves us at least two weeks out of every month. It's reduced our workload by 50 percent, easily.”

    Symantec® SiteMinder is designed to secure the modern enterprise through a unified access management platform that applies the appropriate authentication mechanism to positively identify users; provides single sign-on and identity federation for seamless access to any application; enforces granular security policies to stop unauthorized access to sensitive resources; and monitors and manages the entire user session to prevent session hijacking. Finally, Symantec SiteMinder is battle-tested and has been deployed in the largest IT environments in the world.

    Sample Customers
    City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
    British Telecom, CoreBlox, DBS, HMS, Itera ASA and Simeo
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Aerospace/Defense Firm18%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Consumer Goods Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Government10%
    Healthcare Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm39%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Retailer7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm33%
    Insurance Company11%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise67%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise67%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business8%
    Midsize Enterprise4%
    Large Enterprise88%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise82%
    Buyer's Guide
    One Identity Active Roles vs. Symantec Siteminder
    March 2020
    Find out what your peers are saying about One Identity Active Roles vs. Symantec Siteminder and other solutions. Updated: March 2020.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    One Identity Active Roles is ranked 5th in User Provisioning Software with 17 reviews while Symantec Siteminder is ranked 16th in Single Sign-On (SSO). One Identity Active Roles is rated 8.6, while Symantec Siteminder is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of One Identity Active Roles writes "Single interface and workflows simplify AD and Azure AD management efficiency and security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Siteminder writes "Easy to implement and customize and very stable". One Identity Active Roles is most compared with Microsoft Entra ID, ManageEngine ADManager Plus, One Identity Manager, SailPoint IdentityIQ and Softerra Adaxes, whereas Symantec Siteminder is most compared with PingFederate, ForgeRock, Okta Workforce Identity, PingID and Microsoft Entra ID. See our One Identity Active Roles vs. Symantec Siteminder report.

    We monitor all User Provisioning Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.