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LastPass vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 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

LastPass
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
22nd
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Password Managers (17th), AIOps (29th)
Symantec Siteminder
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Web Access Management (1st), Access Management (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Single Sign-On (SSO) category, the mindshare of LastPass is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Siteminder is 2.6%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
 

Featured Reviews

MK
Straightforward to set up, good support, intuitive to use, and offers good value for the cost
The most valuable feature is being able to use a single master password to access all of your other passwords. One feature that is really important to us is the ability to create secure notes. In our scenario, these are notes such as how to get some of our devices on the network. They are processes and procedures that we don't want anybody else to see, especially within the IT department. It's a small department and we have very many processes that we use, but not on a daily basis, so we aren't going to remember them. By using LastPass and secure notes, we can go back to those notes in a secure fashion and remind ourselves how to do certain things. For instance, how to create a test database for accounting, which is something that we do once a year. We don't want that to be out in a non-secure fashion, where somebody in the public can see it.
Muzi Lubisi - PeerSpot reviewer
Improved user experience with seamless integration and easy installation
The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows. Additionally, it is very beneficial for deploying single sign-on sessions between different windows on a web browser, provided I am connected to the right identity provider. That seamless integration significantly improves user experience and efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Scalability is fine, no issues with that, especially now that they have added different user-level permissions. That has made it a lot easier to delegate out certain features to have other people do."
"It's always hard to put a value on return on investment. You avoid one breach and it's paid for a million times over. We got a penetration test company internally, just to see how secure our network is, and there happened to be one bit of software that had been overlooked by an external company that managed it. It hadn't been upgraded so that managed to get them into the network. They would've been able to access through the test thing a file that we had previously. If that was a real-life scenario they would have been able to get into our network and get full access to our organization's passwords. If they did get in, they would have gotten access to the cloud. The ROI we see is that we are completely secured compared to what we had previously where there was a vulnerability."
"Increased security around password management for teams and collaborative efforts with external vendors."
"The most valuable feature for me is being able to pair applications and user permissions."
"Off-boarding of people is easy without changing shared account passwords."
"This product helps keep us secure."
"The shared folders is an important feature. It's the primary feature we use. Also, the ability for LastPass to autofill and hide the passwords, so we don't have to keep changing passwords every time a person leaves, is valuable."
"Tech support has been good. We haven't needed it much, because it is not a complex application. There is not that much you have to do with it."
"The most valuable feature is that it meets the requirements of the customer. You have a lot of features in the product. Every product has them, but the question is, are these products going to meet the requirement of the customer?"
"It's quite scalable."
"Ease of use is very good, for administrating it. It's very well known."
"It provides the breadth and the width to provide solutions for the different kinds of technologies which we have."
"The solution has features that allow you to easily distinguish between protected and unprotected resources."
"The solution is easy to use for our managers."
"The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows."
"It is reliable."
 

Cons

"The biggest thing is there is no good way to have LastPass rotate passwords without human intervention. Right now, we have to go into each folder, then rotate and manually update each password. It can be done it by loading a bunch of passwords into a spreadsheet, but this makes the whole process insecure because then the passwords have been noted into a spreadsheet which have to be upload. We have to go into 40 to 50 applications and manually update passwords, because we don't view their solution of writing a bunch of passwords on a spreadsheet, then uploading them as a secure solution. This should be done internally within LastPass."
"We have issues from time to time where, for some reason, it just keeps auto logging-out the user and then, the next day, they'll come in and it will work just fine."
"The ability to set up an account expiration limit/date would be very useful."
"Right now we have two products; there is the password manager and there is the authenticator app. Ideally, these should be fully integrated and support better handling of two-factor authentication or any other authenticator data."
"One thing I wish LastPass had is an integration with Active Directory, not for synchronizing users but to actually manage, in some way, privileged accounts by replacing the password of LastPass itself."
"It is not super feature laden. It does not stand out versus the competition."
"Its user interface should be better, and there should probably be more information about scalability."
"I struggle a little bit with the mobile app. As a browser extension, it works really well, and we are able to get to what we need to. However, on the phone, it's not quite as easy to navigate."
"To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly."
"Better documentation. I went through some sessions on single sign-on for version 12.7."
"I would prefer to see their SAML integration be a more streamlined and easier interface."
"The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live."
"They need to make configurations easier, and not have the engineer having to guess what will happen when he changes a particular setting."
"If the reporting feature can be integrated into SSO itself that will be an icing on the cake."
"CA has reporting at the moment. With the reporting, every particular segmented product has a reporting engine. I would like to see centralized reporting for all of them together."
"The maintenance cost has increased significantly, and we are concerned about this."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you import from sources like XML, keepass, CSV files be sure to clean the import files, this reduces the adjustments in the slow tool itself."
"I was not terribly alarmed with the pricing, and am pleased with the fact that a home license is included with each business license."
"In terms of pricing, my feeling is that they are all roughly the same. LastPass is in line with its competitors, plus or minute a dollar or two per month."
"It would be nice to do a quarterly true-up process with them versus having to buy 50 licenses at a time when we realize we're out, then we have to buy more. So far, they have been nice about letting us exceed our allotment and just letting us true-up on our own, but a more robust quarterly true-up process would be good."
"LastPass was cheap as chips. It was very cheap, hence one of the reasons we went with it. If you're a small organization and you're after something that'll do 90% of your requirements, it's very good. Licensing and all that was really cheap and simple to understand."
"I have been involved with many password managers. Passportal, Secret Server, CyberArk, and BeyondTrust. I chose LastPass for our organization because of the pricing. The organization didn't want to implement something really expensive. LastPass, for what it's offering, for the price that it's offering the service, is unbeatable."
"The pricing and licensing are okay. Basically, at the last contract negotiation, they attempted to jack the rate up and we just said, "No." We still did negotiations with them, but they bumped everything up quite a bit."
"You do not have to purchase licenses for your entire organization. You can scale as adoption grows."
"The licensing is fair for this solution."
"The solution's pricing is competitive."
"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
"Siteminder is a little costly. You pay for licensing, and they offer packages, so if you have less users, then you have to buy different products at different prices. If you have more of a user base, then the package is different. They also include other features—for example, if you have a database and you're using Siteminder, then it's good to use a Semantic-specific database, but if you are using less, then you have to purchase the database separately. Whereas if you are going for a bigger license, then it comes within the package. It depends on which plan you are using."
"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Insurance Company
12%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Symantec Siteminder?
It's agent-based. It's convenient to deploy and integrate.
What needs improvement with Symantec Siteminder?
Symantec Siteminder needs to have adaptive authentication and multi-factor authentication as integrated features. Currently, multi-factor authentication is available as a separate solution, and it ...
 

Also Known As

LastPass Business, LastPass Enterprise, Lastpasss
SiteMinder, CA SSO, Layer7 SiteMinder
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deakin University, Duke University, Code.org, Influitive, PeopleKeys, SMA Technologies, Skynamo
British Telecom, CoreBlox, DBS, HMS, Itera ASA and Simeo
Find out what your peers are saying about LastPass vs. Symantec Siteminder and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.