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.
"The most valuable feature is its ability to act as an identity provider for other cloud-based, SaaS applications. In our bank, this is the main identity provider for such features."
"Having access to Azure Active Directory on the cloud gives us speed and use of the latest technology. The application services are very good, such as GitHub."
"It certainly centralizes usernames, and it certainly centralizes credentials. Companies have different tolerances for synchronizing those credentials versus redirecting to on-prem. The use case of maturing into the cloud helps from a SaaS adoption standpoint, and it also tends to be the jumping-off point for larger organizations to start doing PaaS and infrastructure as a service. So, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service kind of dovetail off the Active Directory synchronization piece and the email and SharePoint. It becomes a natural step for people, who wouldn't normally do infrastructure as a service, because they're already exposed to this, and they have already set up their email and SharePoint there. All of the components are there."
"In terms of identity management, it helps to improve security posture. It generally helps in terms cloud security, simplicity, and single sign-on for multiple apps."
"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."
"It's multi-tenant, residing in multiple locations. The authentication happens quickly. Irrespective of whether I'm in Australia, the US, India, or Africa, I don't see any latency. Those are the good features that I rely on."
"Azure Active Directory provides us with identity-based authentication, which secures access at the user level and also integrates with conditional access policies and multi-factor authentication helping to increase the identity security for that person. So, the hacking and leaking of passwords is a secondary problem because you will not authenticate a person with one factor. There is a second factor of authentication available to increase the security premise for your company."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of scalability."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features depend on a customer's needs. Our customers generally find multi-factor authentication very useful."
"The support for YubiKey is really good because you don't actually have to type in your username and password."
"Other than Okta being an easy and awesome integration tool, one of the best features it has is the provisioning and deprovisioning, which makes management way easier. You don't need to be too technical to understand how it works."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are the integration with external websites one-factor authentication."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"We find the solution to be stable."
"The initial setup of Okta Workforce Identity is straightforward. I was able to get an environment ready within half a day."
"Its area of improvement is more about the synchronization of accounts and the intervals for that. Sometimes, there're customers with other network challenges, and it takes a while for synchronization to happen to the cloud. There is some component of their on-prem that is delaying things getting to the cloud. The turnaround time for these requests is very time-sensitive. I don't mean this as derogatory for this service, but in my experience, that happens a lot."
"Compatibility features for legacy system integration with new features will be challenging at times."
"I would like it to be easier to integrate third-party applications."
"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."
"Be aware that it may not work perfectly globally yet. There are still glitches with the solution in Africa."
"Tech support is inconsistent."
"I would like to be able to authenticate Wi-Fi users using the Azure ID"
"I think something that is key would be the group policies replication over the cloud, in order to prevent or to avoid relying on the on-premise Active Directory servers and to manage group policies."
"The solution lacks an on-premises deployment model so it can't offer a hybrid solution. It would be ideal if clients had options that weren't just cloud-based."
"We've not had any problems with Okta."
"It is challenging to obtain a comprehensive backup."
"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."
"Okta Workforce Identity could improve the way passwords are reset and how it interfaces with Microsoft."
"You can't hide the device when you're checking logs."
"It can have more API integrations."
"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."
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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