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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) (33rd)
One Identity Active Roles
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (3rd), Active Directory Management (1st), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (1st)
 

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 1.0%, up 0.3% compared to last year.
One Identity Active Roles, on the other hand, focuses on Active Directory Management, holds 12.3% mindshare, up 6.6% since last year.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager1.0%
CyberArk Privileged Access Manager9.8%
One Identity Safeguard4.3%
Other84.9%
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Active Directory Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
One Identity Active Roles12.3%
Netwrix Auditor10.6%
ManageEngine ADManager Plus10.0%
Other67.1%
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.
Varun Mehra - PeerSpot reviewer
collaboration support engineer at a retailer with 11-50 employees
Automation has transformed onboarding and access control and now streamlines daily governance
While One Identity Active Roles is a strong identity and access management solution overall, there are a few areas where it could improve. One challenge we experienced was the initial setup and configuration complexity. Deploying workflows, policies, and delegation models require careful planning and a good understanding of the Active Directory environment. For organizations without experienced administrators, the learning curve can feel quite steep in the beginning. The user interface could also be more modern and intuitive. Some administrative tasks require navigating through multiple menus and the overall experience could be simplified for faster day-to-day management. Another area for improvement is reporting and customization. While the auditing features are good, creating highly customized reports sometimes requires additional efforts or scripting knowledge. More built-in reporting templates and easier dashboard customization would be helpful. We have also noticed that troubleshooting workflows or synchronization issues can occasionally take time because the logs can be very detailed and technical. Better diagnostic tools and simpler error explanations would improve the operational experience. That said, once the platform is properly configured and maintained, it performs reliably and delivers strong automation, delegation, and governance capabilities. One additional area where One Identity Active Roles could improve is cloud integration and hybrid environment management. While it works well with Active Directory and the Microsoft environment, organizations moving heavily towards cloud-first infrastructure may want even deeper and more seamless integration with modern SaaS platforms and identity providers. Performance optimization in large environments could be improved. In very large enterprise deployments with complex workflows and multiple managed domains, some administrative actions and synchronization tasks can occasionally feel slower than expected. Another point is documentation and onboarding resources. The product is feature-rich, but some advanced configurations require going through extensive documentation. More practical examples, guided setup wizards, and easier to follow best practice guides would help new administrators adopt the platform faster. Overall, the core functionality is solid, and most of the pain points are related more to usability, complexity, and modernization rather than the reliability. One additional improvement I would mention is around integration flexibility with third-party ITSM and DevOps tools. While the platform integrates well within Microsoft-centric environments, broader out-of-the-box integration and simpler API workflows for non-Microsoft ecosystems would make deployment and automation easier for organizations using diverse infrastructure. Another area is upgrade and migration simplicity. In enterprise environments, version upgrades and environment migration sometimes require careful planning and testing. Streamlining that process with more automated compatibility checks and migration assistance would reduce operational overhead.

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."
"HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility."
"Using One Identity Active Roles, we reduced our user provisioning time from hours to minutes, lowered service desk workload by approximately 40 to 60 minutes, reduced manual administration errors, and improved audit and compliance efficiency."
"One Identity Active Roles has impacted our organization positively because the biggest benefit has been reducing manual administration through automation and standardized workflows, so tasks such as onboarding, offboarding, group assignments, and access requests are now much faster and more consistent than before, helping create a more structured identity management process across the organization."
"One Identity Active Roles has had a very positive impact on our organization, mainly by improving efficiency and security at the same time."
"One Identity Active Roles has positively impacted our organization by improving operational efficiency, strengthening governance, and reducing manual administrative effort within Active Directory and identity management operations."
"One Identity Active Roles has had a very positive impact on our organization, especially in terms of productivity, security, and compliance."
"One Identity Active Roles has a positive impact on our organization by improving the efficiency and consistency of our Active Directory operations."
"The solution improved our organization's security posture by framing the end users and ensuring that capabilities that could cause mistakes are hidden from the web interface."
"It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
 

Cons

"I would not necessarily recommend customers use it."
"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."
"The initial setup and configuration can be complex, especially when designing workflows, policies, and delegation models."
"There is room for improvement in One Identity Active Roles. While the product is very capable, managing complex workflows and hybrid environments can sometimes require deeper expertise than expected, so better cloud integration and troubleshooting visibility would also be valuable improvements."
"One Identity Active Roles can be improved by modernizing the UI to be more responsive, as some advanced workflow configurations can feel a bit clunky during setup."
"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."
"One Identity Active Roles is very useful, though there are a few areas where it could be improved, such as the user interface, policy creation, and reporting; it requires good knowledge of Active Directory."
"The user and group management in Azure AD could be better. Our focus these days is dynamic sharing with several on-prem Microsoft applications like SharePoint."
"One specific issue I have encountered recently is that the interface and workflow configuration can become complex and less intuitive, especially when managing multiple approval steps or modifying existing workflows, which sometimes requires deeper scripting or backend adjustments, so more user-friendly and visual workflow design would be a great improvement."
"In terms of improvement, it could be made even more user-friendly for administrators when they need to create new workflows and rule sets."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"It's fairly priced."
"It's expensive."
"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."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business90
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise42
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for One Identity Active Roles are enterprise-oriented and typically based on the number of managed users or accounts. While setup requires moderate implementa...
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
One Identity Active Roles can be improved with a more modern user interface, better reporting and analytics capabilities, simplified workflow customization, improved troubleshooting tools, and stro...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Active Roles?
One Identity Active Roles serves as our centralized Active Directory administration platform for identity lifecycle management, including automated user provisioning, delegated administration, role...
 

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, Okta and others in Privileged Access Management (PAM). Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.