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One Identity Active Roles vs One Identity Manager 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.4
One Identity Active Roles enhances efficiency and security, reduces workload and risks, delivering quick returns and increased user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.9
One Identity Manager boosts productivity, reduces costs, and enhances security by automating user provisioning and access management.
One Identity Active Roles provides excellent reporting and auditing functionality, allowing administrators to track permissions, actions, and responsibilities effectively.
It has saved 90% of the time compared to before.
Without it, we would need thousands of additional people.
If you do not see it as purely an Identity Management tool but as a possibility to automate processes in the company, it provides a huge amount of value.
One Identity Manager saved us approximately thirty to forty percent in terms of time, money, and resources compared to our pre-deployment setup.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.7
One Identity Active Roles support is responsive and effective, with occasional delays; users rate it between seven and ten.
Sentiment score
6.6
One Identity Manager's customer service is inconsistent, with varying technical support responsiveness and the importance of partner involvement emphasized.
One Identity's support is great.
I rate customer service and support as a seven because, although they are helpful when needed, there can be delays in responding to tickets and finding necessary fixes.
Sometimes having a fix for a bug takes too much time.
If you have outages or critical production problems, you can count on the manufacturer to help resolve the situation.
They should focus on bringing in technically skilled individuals who understand the tools and technologies involved.
If I raised a request while they were active, I received responses within an hour.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
One Identity Active Roles is scalable for large user bases, efficiently managing multiple directories and automating tasks.
Sentiment score
7.2
One Identity Manager excels in scalability but faces challenges with large datasets and customization for extensive setups.
It is very beneficial for large and complex environments.
If you are a major enterprise customer, it is a matter of scaling out on resources with more memory, disk, and CPU power.
The solution is highly scalable, with a scalability rating of nine.
We could handle about 1,00,000 records for different users.
I would rate its scalability as strong since we have not experienced any significant challenges.
This includes designing and implementing IAM solutions for legacy systems, cloud migrations, and multifactor authentications.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
One Identity Active Roles is generally stable with minimal maintenance, but occasional performance lags and updates are needed.
Sentiment score
7.3
One Identity Manager is stable when correctly configured, but stability varies with infrastructure and proper maintenance is crucial.
There were no major problems with One Identity Active Roles.
We haven't had any glitches.
I would rate the stability as a seven because there are sometimes performance issues, which require restarting the services.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
Specifically affecting the test and development environments, not the production environment.
One Identity Manager has improved in terms of performance and added functionality.
 

Room For Improvement

One Identity Active Roles needs better web interface customization, scripting support, integration, user interface scalability, and improved workflows and security.
One Identity Manager requires improved performance, user interface, integration, documentation, streamlined processes, and enhanced database management for better functionality.
A way to connect to various directories and integrate with cloud directories would be beneficial.
Enhancements to the console are also necessary because it is more confusing than the web interface.
The user interface needs to be more modern and scalable.
This lack of 24-hour support is problematic from a testing and development standpoint.
It is crucial for them to expand their support team to match their product's success.
In terms of providing a single platform for enterprise-level administration and governance of users, data, and privileged accounts, One Identity is not yet there.
 

Setup Cost

One Identity Active Roles uses a user-based licensing model with high costs but offers significant ROI and flexibility.
One Identity Manager offers competitive pricing with savings for large enterprises, but may be costly for smaller businesses.
It is quite expensive, costing more than 50 euros per identity.
The pricing is high.
The pricing of One Identity Active Roles is expensive, but the return on investment justifies the cost, allowing for savings in other areas.
On-premises might incur higher costs.
We have a good enterprise license agreement, and we are very happy with what we get for the price we pay for it.
On-premises, it is cheap.
 

Valuable Features

One Identity Active Roles enhances security and management with robust access control, automation, integration, and centralized directory management.
One Identity Manager offers flexibility, automation, and integration, enhancing efficiency while providing dynamic application provisioning and user-friendly interface.
It's improved our security posture. It has limited access to our crown jewels, where all our identities lie within Active Directory.
It helps in removing custom Active Directory delegation, which enhances security by eliminating unnecessary privileges, addressing identity-based breaches by reducing the number of Active Directory delegations.
It is very intuitive and close to the native tools.
It ensures high security through multiple approval processes, preventing unauthorized access and enhancing compliance by providing time-based access for privileged accounts with proper audit trails.
It continuously monitors user behavior in real-time, triggering automated responses, and manages secure access for both on-premises and cloud applications using protocols such as SAML.
Once you have some experience, it demonstrates best practices and guides you on the correct way to use the tool.
 

Categories and Ranking

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 (1st), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (5th)
One Identity Manager
Ranking in User Provisioning Software
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
123
Ranking in other categories
Identity Management (IM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the User Provisioning Software category, the mindshare of One Identity Active Roles is 5.3%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of One Identity Manager is 10.8%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
User Provisioning Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
One Identity Manager10.8%
One Identity Active Roles5.3%
Other83.9%
User Provisioning Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Charles Essien - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes identity management more robust with the new portal, but needs faster processing and better support
For basic tasks, it's acceptable, but when there are complexities and building on those complexities, it becomes slow because One Identity Manager doesn't do parallel processing; it processes in series and in batches. That's a drawback because with a heavy database and many processes, it becomes slow, which isn't ideal for user experience. There are many areas in One Identity Manager that have room for improvement. I don't prefer that One Identity Manager uses series processing where everything is in a queue; it has to process in order, which means there are too many layers involved in processing a single piece of information. If they could simplify that and make processing faster, it would be perfect. The database queue process doesn't make sense, and it's annoying waiting for processes to finish before another starts. Also, when upgrading, they should be more considerate; with the transition from One Identity Manager 7.0 to 8.2, many functions were phased out, requiring extensive upgrading of numerous scripts. I find it pretty difficult to customize the solution because you really need to be an expert. If you have about one year of experience, you can't do much with One Identity Manager. You need many years of experience to customize solutions effectively.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Healthcare Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise81
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about One Identity Manager?
The One Identity birthright process has helped generate user accounts more accurately and quickly.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Manager?
The pricing for One Identity Manager is competitive in our region, so there is no issue with the license pricing. However, aside from the license for the StarLink apps, the cost is justified.
What needs improvement with One Identity Manager?
The ease of use of One Identity Manager could improve as the web portal is not the most user-friendly, and there are many places where the settings exist which can make it fuzzy and difficult to fi...
 

Also Known As

Quest Active Roles
Quest One Identity Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Texas A&M, Sky Media, BHF Bank, Swiss Post, Union Investment, Wayne State University. More at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Find out what your peers are saying about One Identity Active Roles vs. One Identity Manager and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
867,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.