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Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager vs One Identity Active Roles comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortra's Powertech Identity...
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (40th)
One Identity Active Roles
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (5th), Active Directory Management (1st), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Identity and Access Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager is designed for Privileged Access Management (PAM) and holds a mindshare of 0.9%, up 0.2% compared to last year.
One Identity Active Roles, on the other hand, focuses on Active Directory Management, holds 10.8% mindshare, up 6.5% since last year.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager0.9%
CyberArk Privileged Access Manager11.6%
WALLIX Bastion5.1%
Other82.4%
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Active Directory Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
One Identity Active Roles10.8%
ManageEngine ADManager Plus12.6%
Netwrix Auditor9.4%
Other67.2%
Active Directory Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer910470 - PeerSpot reviewer
Practice Lead at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Inexperienced support for old product, but good flexibility for use case customization
HelpSystems Powertech is scalable if you throw more servers at it. Then you can distribute the load, which is a Microsoft SQL Server backend, and as long as you allocate enough resources to those things, then it is scalable. That's good enough. It would be an entire organization that uses it. So at a hospital for example, a healthcare system, a bank, and it would be the entire workforce on it. I haven't see a lot of customer's specific use cases, but it is for the whole workforce, everyone. The CEO of the company to the janitor. In terms of maintaining it, that requires application administrators or system administrators. There is a manual process to update the product, at least with the on-premise version.
reviewer2789802 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Identity & M365 Engineering at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Granular delegated access has strengthened least privilege control across complex directories
One of the things I would like to see more robust is the change history. One Identity Active Roles can only monitor changes that happen in the console, and the logs don't go back longer than thirty days, maybe sixty days. The change history, when we've seen accounts get modified, we leverage a container domain that funnels accounts into our Active Directory console. I would like to see from an initial user provisioning perspective, for them to isolate the workflow and say that this came in on X date and account was created. If anyone were to modify that account from an external resource, I would like to be able to read that as well. One Identity Active Roles is strictly limited to the console. If someone makes a change, the history of those changes is not as long as I would prefer.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility. It is able to be extended. A lot of the products these days, especially the ones on the cloud, are limited and can't handle all the use cases. Often there is not even a way to customize the application to meet uncommon use cases and HelpSystems provides an infrastructure that lends itself to the ability to be customized."
"The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good."
"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 provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
"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."
"Active Roles improved the management of users, groups, and AD objects in the organization."
"Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome."
"The access templates help set up granular permissions and the web portal to manage Active Directory."
"Instead of deleting accounts, we like the deprovision option so that we can reverse any accidental deletions. It also gives a higher level of quality control in terms of enforcing any number of variables, such as making sure that an account has a description entered before the account can be created. We can backtrack and know the history of it that way."
 

Cons

"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the support of the product. It's hard to get support for it. I think this is emblematic of the fact that they don't have a lot of employees who have long-term experience with it."
"We don't get a lot of communication from the One Identity side. I don't know who our account representative is, and that is kind of not good since we have had some turnover there."
"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."
"When we add numerous domains, it becomes slow. With around 60 domains, attempting to add approximately 30 caused significant performance issues."
"There is always room to improve the user interface for increased clarity. I believe enhancements to the console are also necessary because it is more confusing than the web interface."
"Additional documentation about the Angular web interface is needed."
"There is always room to improve the user interface for increased clarity. I believe enhancements to the console are also necessary because it is more confusing than the web interface."
"The possibility to request group membership, similar to the past, was disabled and moved to Identity Manager."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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 high. I have not been involved with the renewal or cost aspect, but I know it is not cheap by any means. However, it is very useful for our environment."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"It's fairly priced."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"It's expensive."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
The product is expensive, but if you want to save money, the delegation set-up process is quite easy. After setting up Active Roles once, defining the delegation model, it is very efficient, almost...
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
The interface appears outdated. Once logged in, everything inside remains unchanged from years ago. Additionally, when they release new features, they should provide training or webinars at least o...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Active Roles?
I use One Identity Active Roles primarily for identity management. We use it for managing multiple domains from a single interface, and the domains do not have trust between them. It has been used ...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Powertech Identity & Access Manager, Powertech Identity & Access Manager, BoKS, BoKS ServerControl, Fox Technologies ApplicationControl, ApplicationControl
Quest Active Roles
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Integris Health
City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Find out what your peers are saying about CyberArk, One Identity, Delinea and others in Privileged Access Management (PAM). Updated: December 2025.
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