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IBM Security Identity Governance and Intelligence vs One Identity Active Roles comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 6, 2024

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

IBM Security Identity Gover...
Ranking in User Provisioning Software
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Identity Management (IM) (28th)
One Identity Active Roles
Ranking in User Provisioning Software
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Active Directory Management (5th), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the User Provisioning Software category, the mindshare of IBM Security Identity Governance and Intelligence is 1.6%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of One Identity Active Roles is 4.3%, up from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
User Provisioning Software
 

Featured Reviews

Siraz Shaik - PeerSpot reviewer
Clear evaluation and life cycle management; service center could be more user friendly
Our primary use case is for publishing and our customer has somewhere between 3,000-4,000 users. We're partners with IBM and I work as a security consultant.  This solution has a very good dashboard and the documentation is also very good. Life cycle management and governance are also good…
Grzegorz Kosela - PeerSpot reviewer
Task automation simplifies user and delegation management while offering a customizable interface
Currently, task automation, like provisioning, deprovisioning, and reprovisioning, is very effective. When a user moves from one organization to another, it automatically changes their group membership and performs similar functions. Secondly, the granular delegation feature is very nice and much simpler and easier than it is natively in Microsoft. Two years ago, One Identity Active Roles was under Dell. It was quite poor. However, now, there have been notable improvements, such as faster system processing, better logging, enhanced information, and a more user-friendly interface. Once it was sold by Dell, things got better. The interface became a bit more user-friendly. The Angular user interface is much more flexible for adjusting to customer needs, and a completely new and customizable one can be created, aligning with all settings and scripts required by a customer. The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. The solution's ability to provision and deprovision resources and directories like Azure AD is very simple, especially when you can integrate with the HR system and grab some data from HR. It's actually fully automatic. I don't need to even touch it. It's helped increase operational efficiency by 50%. It's helped decrease security problems around privileged accounts. We were able to decrease the number of privileged accounts and have been able to delegate more effectively. We decreased the number of high-level permissions that administrators had. For example, if someone is a DNS administrator, he has access only as far as the specific actions he needs to handle. We don't need to give away such high privileges for such a daily job. It's helped clarify roles and access. It's helped reduce identity-based breaches. If someone leaves a company, we can easily undo provisioning and close accounts. We can generate reports to see which people have which permissions and at what times. We've just integrated with our HR system. It helps us follow activated and deactivated users. I'd rate the granular controls on offer ten out of ten. We've saved on manpower in terms of the work of the administrators. There's good reporting and functionality, and it's very transparent. You can connect more than one directory and manage everything from one pane. You can do many things from one interface.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Lifecycle management, governance and documentation."
"I would rate the price eight out of 10, with 10 as the best value for money."
"Active Roles is easy to configure. It isn't a plug-and-play solution, and you need expertise to set it up. However, once you have your templates, it's easy to deploy in a highly decentralized environment. The custom configuration for our customers is fantastic, especially the web interface."
"It is very intuitive and close to the native tools. Since it is web-based, it does not require extensive training for our end users."
"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."
"The most valuable features include auditing, dynamic grouping, and creating dynamic groups based on AD attributes."
"The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good."
"It's valuable to us in that it resembles the native tools that most people have grown accustomed to... Active Roles resembles traditional tools, such as from Microsoft. That is really good because it eases the way people interact with the tool."
"Secure access is the most valuable feature."
"The provisioning and deprovisioning saves a lot of time and skips a lot of errors."
 

Cons

"The solution is a bit pricey for some regions."
"Self service center is not always easy to understand."
"The user interface needs to be more modern and scalable. There are certain screen resolutions where the product is unusable."
"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."
"The third area for improvement, which is the weakest portion of ARS, is the workflow engine, which was introduced a few years ago. It's slow and not very intuitive to use, so I would like to see improvement there."
"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."
"The user interface needs to be more modern and scalable."
"The way you can search groups could be better."
"It also has workflows and those are really powerful, but there are no built-in workflows. When it comes to them, it's empty. I would personally love for it to come with ten, 15, or 20 workflows where each achieves a certain task... I could just look at how each is done, clone them, copy them, modify them the way I want them, and be good to go. Right now we have to invent things from scratch."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the price eight out of 10, with 10 as the best value for money."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"It's expensive."
"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 is on the higher end."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"The price is reasonable. It costs us about 1 million Danish kroner annually, and we also spend about half as much on consultants."
"It's fairly priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Government
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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?
One area for improvement would be the Entra ID side, including better delegation for Entra ID objects and more granular permissions. We would also like to see better Entra ID license management usi...
 

Also Known As

IGI, IBM Security Identity Manager, ISIM
Quest Active Roles
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

E.ON Global Commodities
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 IBM Security Identity Governance and Intelligence vs. One Identity Active Roles and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.