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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 best part of this Active Roles is the workflow engine. It features an industry-leading workflow automation feature. It's a visual PowerShell that allows task interruption."
"It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
"Active Roles helped reduce our identity-based breaches."
"Active Roles helped increase operational efficiency in our organization."
"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."
"Secure access is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is stable."
"The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good."
 

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."
"When doing a workflow, we would like a bit better feedback on the screen, as we're trying to get it to work. For example, there is a "Find" function that you need set up in a workflow to do some of the automation. It is not the easiest to get a result from those finds when you're trying to do that. In the MMC, they have a couple different types of workflows. In this particular case, we use their workflow functionality to find all of X within the environment, then if you find it, do X, Y, and Z. You can have multiple steps. When you do that search function within that workflow, it's really hard to find out, "Is my search working?" It would be nice if there was some feedback on the screen so you could see if your search is working properly within the workflow."
"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."
"The initial setup was quite easy, but it was time-consuming. It took about three months."
"It's a fairly stable product but not perfectly reliable."
"The ability to send logs to a SIEM would be very beneficial."
"There are areas for improvement in One Identity Active Roles that include updating the web interface, creating an API accessible from the web, and improving overall performance, as it can be slow at times."
"I've had a difficult time getting it to cooperate with Azure in the cloud and, while the support staff are very good and very knowledgeable, what they assist with just on a call doesn't go deep enough to help with a number of issues. The answer that comes back is that we'd have to start an engagement with Professional Services, which is fine but that takes time to schedule and it takes budget."
"For ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"It's fairly priced."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"The price is reasonable. It costs us about 1 million Danish kroner annually, and we also spend about half as much on consultants."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"It's expensive."
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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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