We performed a comparison between Microsoft Entra ID and Symantec Advanced Authentication based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Cisco, Fortinet and others in Authentication Systems."The most valuable feature is the ability to deploy and make changes to every workstation that I need to. We use it to control policy and I can apply the right policies to all our 1,500 workstations, notebooks, et cetera."
"It's something we have to deal with every day. It is present. If you're in a domain environment, you'll need it to log in. If you work in a Microsoft-centric environment, you can't avoid it."
"This solution is less time-consuming. We don't have to hire as many resources to give permissions to a particular user or group for any application."
"Conditional access is a very important feature where a specific user can be restricted such that they cannot connect to the application if they travel outside of the US."
"The most valuable feature is Identity and Access Management. As an IT administrator, this feature allows me to manage access for users and groups."
"Single sign-on provides flexibility and helps because users don't want to remember so many passwords when logging in. It's a major feature. Once you log in, you have access to all the applications. It also enables us to provide backend access controls to our users, especially when it comes to groups, as we are trying to normalize things."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that is easy to use."
"The cloud security part is very valuable. Security is the most important thing in today's world. With Azure Active Directory, there are some features that tell you how you need to improve your security level. It informs you if you set up certain policies, e.g., this is where my users sign in. It tends to let you know if your organization has been breached with this security set up. Therefore, it is easier to know when you have been breached, especially if you set up a Conditional Access policy for your organization."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it's a strong authentication solution that's able to integrate with applications."
"It tells us exactly what we want in terms of authentication to various applications and provides protection for users who access them."
"Rules on Risk Authentication are very good."
"One of the most valuable aspects is its remarkable stability."
"A nice feature that is not currently present, would be if they had some visualization tools."
"On-premise capabilities for information and identity management need improvement."
"ESAE management, especially the admin tools, could be improved. It should be built in by the vendor, and I shouldn't have to add patches or updates to connect to my domain directly. It should be added by default. The price could be better."
"Compatibility features for legacy system integration with new features will be challenging at times."
"The only issue with Azure AD is that it doesn't have control over the wifi network. You have to do something more to have a secure wifi network. To have it working, you need an active directory server on-premises to take care of the networks."
"When you start to deal with legacy applications, provisioning is not as intuitive."
"Azure AD provides two types of features. One is Azure AD Excel and is already B2C. Out of both versions, Azure B2C requires some improvement, in terms of user management and role management, et cetera."
"They have had a few outages, so stability is a little bit of an issue. It is global. That is the thing. I know some of the other competitors are regionalized ID platforms, but Entra ID is global, so when something goes wrong, it is a problem because it underpins everything, whether you are logging in to M365 or you have single sign-on to Azure, Autopilot, Intune, Exchange mailbox or another application. If there is a problem with Entra ID, all of that falls apart, so its great strength and weakness is the global single tenant for it. Stability is a key area for me. Otherwise, it is generally pretty good."
"We have seen quite a few issues with bugginess. It is indeed pretty buggy and we have had to install some fixes."
"This solution could be improved with risk-based authentication. I think that this product has everything that most customers are looking for, but modern technology has people looking for security tools with risk-based authentication, which they have a separate tool for. If they could integrate this, it would improve Symantec Advanced Authentication. They have to look at what's newly trending and how things are moving forward, and then adapt and adopt those features. Symantec's technical support should also be improved, in terms of response time."
"Advanced Authentication talks about the Device ID. But how the device ID is captured, I want to know more about that."
"Urgent improvement is necessary to ensure that support responses are faster and more effective, aligning with the demands of MFA implementation."
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Microsoft Entra ID is ranked 1st in Authentication Systems with 190 reviews while Symantec Advanced Authentication is ranked 19th in Authentication Systems with 9 reviews. Microsoft Entra ID is rated 8.6, while Symantec Advanced Authentication is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Entra ID writes "Allows users to authenticate from home and has excellent integrations in a simple, stable solution". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Advanced Authentication writes "Ensures robust security features and ease of deployment, although it may lack some of the more modern authentication options ". Microsoft Entra ID is most compared with Microsoft Intune, Google Cloud Identity, CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, Yubico YubiKey and Cisco Duo, whereas Symantec Advanced Authentication is most compared with OneSpan DIGIPASS, Thales Authenticators and Symantec VIP Access Manager.
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