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.
"We do not have to deploy lots of machines all over the place to run things as a service, which is how we like to deploy things, just as a service."
"The single sign-on is very convenient for us."
"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 scalability of the product is decent."
"The best thing about Microsoft Entra ID is the ease of setup."
"It is easy to manage. I can manage systems with policies and automate our systems. Any professional system can be easily integrated with Azure Active Directory. It is widely used with Windows versions."
"The most valuable features are the Conditional Access policies, SSPR, and MFA. Another good functionality is registering enterprise applications to provide access to external parties. These four features are precious and are the most used across different use cases for various clients and projects."
"Valuable features include UD, SSO functionality, MFA and Adaptive MFA functionality, ability to link multiple Directory databases with UD."
"The most valuable features depend on a customer's needs. Our customers generally find multi-factor authentication very useful."
"I like the tool's workflows, which is user-friendly. It can integrate with different applications. I particularly like that users are delighted to access their applications without the hassle of entering their username and password each time. It truly enhances user-friendliness."
"The provisioning functionality has been the most valuable. This solution has good performance, fast integration and is very responsive."
"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."
"It's reliable and it does what it is advertised to do."
"The most valuable features of Okta Workforce Identity are MFA, and SSO, which have high security."
"A solution that's easy to use, stable, and reliable."
"Transitioning to the cloud is very difficult. They need the training to make it easier."
"The product takes at least ten minutes to activate privilege identity management roles."
"There is a concept of cross-tenant trust relationships, which I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing. That is something which in the coming days and years to come by will be very key to the success of Azure Active Directory, because many organizations are going into mergers and acquisitions or spinning off new companies. They will still have to access the old tenant information because of multiple legal reasons, compliance reasons, and all those things. So, there should be some level of tenant-level trust functionality, where you can bring people from other tenants to access some part of your tenant application. So, that is an area which is growing. I believe Microsoft is actively pursuing this, and it will be an interesting piece."
"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."
"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."
"My understanding is, in the future, they will be able to bring everything into one single platform and they are not there yet."
"Initially, we wanted to exclude specific users from MSA. So, we had a condition policy, which forces MSA for all the users. So we wanted to exclude users who are using an NPS extension. So it was not listed, as a NPS extension was not listed outside an application, in actual, so, we go back and were not able to exclude users using NPS extension from MSA. So that was one limitation that we found and we had to work around that."
"The product needs to improve its support."
"This user integration with the Okta integration network could be simplified."
"The training is too costly."
"There are some issues with the interface that can be improved."
"We still had to write several internal programs/scripts to complete the user-provisioning process. Okta does not have the ability to provision mailbox accounts for on-premise Exchange or in a hybrid O365 environment. The Group Push function from Okta to AD did not work reliably in our environment."
"UD attribute mapping, Okta group rules, and dynamic usage could use improvement. It also needs more in-depth functionality and features to integrate with RADIUS solutions."
"We have experienced some challenges in integrating this solution with Scope and Cognito."
"The only aspect in which it can be improved is that the interface could be cleaner. I found this even when I was trying to do my certification exam because the certification is hands-on. You find yourself fumbling around a little bit to find simple things. This happens even when you start to get familiar with the product."
"In some setup cases, there are issues with attributes not going in properly."
Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 1st in Single Sign-On (SSO) with 190 reviews while Okta Workforce Identity is ranked 4th in Single Sign-On (SSO) with 56 reviews. Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6, while Okta Workforce Identity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Allows users to authenticate from home and has excellent integrations in a simple, stable solution". 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, Yubico YubiKey and RSA SecurID, whereas Okta Workforce Identity is most compared with Google Cloud Identity, SailPoint IdentityIQ, Saviynt, Auth0 and Symantec Siteminder. See our Microsoft Entra ID vs. Okta Workforce Identity report.
See our list of best Single Sign-On (SSO) vendors, best Authentication Systems vendors, and best Access Management vendors.
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