We performed a comparison between Microsoft Entra ID and Symantec Siteminder based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Auth0, Okta and others in Access Management."Just because I've been in the Azure space since it started out and in the Microsoft Cloud AD since the BPOS days in the early 2000s, and it's just a product that made life simpler for my clients to be able to integrate everything."
"It's something we have to deal with every day. It is present. If you're in a domain environment, you'll need it to log in. If you work in a Microsoft-centric environment, you can't avoid it."
"The ability to grant access to other organizations is helpful."
"It's an easy product to maintain."
"It's definitely both stable and scalable."
"Multi-factor authentication (MFA) has improved our customers' security posture. Multi-factor authentication has two layers of authentication, which helps in case you input your credentials into a phishing website and then it has access to your credentials. So if they use your credentials, then you have proof on your phone that was sent to the end user."
"The most valuable features in Active Directory are the password writeback product and the MDM technology."
"The scalability of the product is decent."
"You can quickly deploy the entire product with a basic config within couple of hours."
"Symantec Siteminder Is both scalable and stable."
"The Directory is secure. It's our user store, and it's important to keep our members safe. The product does well with that."
"It has the ability to authenticate and authorize users. It is the main feature for our security."
"The single sign-on is the solution's most valuable feature"
"Authentication & Authorization are important because all the sites need authentication for security purposes. That has been handled pretty well all these years with SSO."
"It has considerably reduced the amount of time that new users would take to join into the organization. Previously, it was a lengthy, manual process because it's a very secure environment, where they need to verify the user before they can actually grant him a user-ID and password. Integrating with the built-in custom application, and exposing CA Single Sign On to the internet, we were able to get the employees onboard. The time that we gained was: previously it would generally take from four to eight weeks for each employee, we brought it to one to two days."
"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?"
"You can manage the users from the Office 365 administration center, and you can manage them from Azure Active Directory. Those are two different environments, but they do the same things. They can gather the features in one place, and it might be better if that place were Azure."
"The conditional access rules are a little limiting. There's greater scope for the variety of rules and conditions you could put in that rules around a more factual authentication for other users. If you have an Azure AD setup, you can then connect to other people's Azure AD, but you don't have a huge amount of control in terms of what you can do. Greater control over guest users and guest access would be better. It's pretty good as it is but that could be improved."
"The product needs to improve its support."
"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."
"Some systems do not integrate very well with Azure AD. We thought of going for Okta, but later on we were able to achieve it, but not the way we wanted. It was not as easy as we thought it would be. The integration was not very seamless."
"Tech support is inconsistent."
"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."
"My problem with Azure AD is that it's designed for medium to large systems, and we're not that large."
"They need to make configurations easier, and not have the engineer having to guess what will happen when he changes a particular setting."
"The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live."
"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."
"I would prefer to see their SAML integration be a more streamlined and easier interface."
"The GUIs are not very clear, especially when integrating with other products from CA."
"We're currently unable to find information about if the solution can do a full implementation with SQL. Some better and more accessible documentation for new users or those curious about the product would be helpful."
"To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly."
"In future releases, I would like to see maybe more capabilities with some more modern authentication."
Earn 20 points
Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 1st in Access Management with 190 reviews while Symantec Siteminder is ranked 17th in Access Management with 69 reviews. Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6, while Symantec Siteminder is rated 8.0. 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 Symantec Siteminder writes "Easy to implement and customize and very stable". Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Yubico YubiKey and Cisco Duo, whereas Symantec Siteminder is most compared with PingFederate, ForgeRock, Okta Workforce Identity, PingID and Auth0.
See our list of best Access Management vendors and best Single Sign-On (SSO) vendors.
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