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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)
21st
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Password Managers (17th), AIOps (28th)
Symantec Siteminder
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
12th
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 May 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 3.7% 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

"Increased security around password management for teams and collaborative efforts with external vendors."
"One feature that is really important to us is the ability to create secure notes."
"The most valuable feature for me is being able to pair applications and user permissions."
"This product helps keep us secure."
"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."
"The initial setup for this process is straightforward and extremely easy. It just works."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the liberty of keeping encrypted passwords and elevated information in a sealed vault."
"It is very scalable. We have a very large customer base: 75 million customers."
"It has the ability to authenticate and authorize users. It is the main feature for our security."
"Ease of use is very good, for administrating it. It's very well known."
"That seamless integration significantly improves user experience and efficiency."
"The solution is easy to use for our managers."
"Symantec Siteminder Is both scalable and stable."
"It has considerably reduced the amount of time that new users would take to join into the organization. Previously, it was a lengthy, manual process because it's a very secure environment, where they need to verify the user before they can actually grant him a user-ID and password. Integrating with the built-in custom application, and exposing CA Single Sign On to the internet, we were able to get the employees onboard. The time that we gained was: previously it would generally take from four to eight weeks for each employee, we brought it to one to two days."
"IWA is an out-of-the-box feature. The SAML-based federation is standard for all tools. However, CA Single Sign-On has made the federation configuration way too simple and handy to set up and use."
 

Cons

"It is not super feature laden. It does not stand out versus the competition."
"Our biggest issue over the years was around the stability of the LDAP sync to AD."
"LastPass has a problem syncing the passwords to all of the users."
"The management through the plugin is poor. It consumes tons of client resources especially as an administrator."
"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."
"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."
"The ability to set up an account expiration limit/date would be very useful."
"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."
"To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly."
"The initial setup of Symantec SiteMinder was a bit tricky. I would rate it a seven on a scale of one to ten, where ten indicates an easy setup."
"The technical support could be better."
"Siteminder needs to improve its user experience."
"In future releases, I would like to see maybe more capabilities with some more modern authentication."
"All the problems that we reported actually have never been resolved. We could not capture enough information for CA to be able to debug the problem."
"While I have some integration with a few major providers, support for more would be advantageous."
"They need to make configurations easier, and not have the engineer having to guess what will happen when he changes a particular setting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The previous pricing was of good value. I don't really know, as of now, whether the new pricing is. The Enterprise license is $48 per license per year now. That is a steep increase of $24, which is what it was when we first signed up."
"I was not terribly alarmed with the pricing, and am pleased with the fact that a home license is included with each business license."
"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."
"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."
"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 subscription model is rated at a fair price."
"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."
"The licensing is fair for this solution."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
"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."
"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
"The solution's pricing is competitive."
"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Insurance Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
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: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.