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One Identity Active Roles vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 9, 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

One Identity Active Roles
Ranking in Active Directory Management
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (5th), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (4th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Active Directory Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Server Monitoring (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Active Directory Management category, the mindshare of One Identity Active Roles is 10.8%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.8%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Active Directory Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
One Identity Active Roles10.8%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.8%
Other87.4%
Active Directory Management
 

Featured Reviews

Grzegorz Kosela - PeerSpot reviewer
solution architect/ engineer at APEX.IT Sp. z o.o.
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.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good."
"It gives us attribute-level control and the AD management features work very well."
"Active Roles helped increase operational efficiency in our organization."
"It is an easier way for me to manage Active Directory with more advanced features."
"One Identity Active Roles takes us less time, probably half the time, to complete delegations that are very granular and complex, compared to having to use native tools and scripts."
"It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
"The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good."
"In comparison to native Active Directory tools, using Active Roles for delegation is so much better. It uses an access template and that makes it easy to see who can access what. In fact, you can do that for many objects as well."
"SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
 

Cons

"I am not really satisfied with the customer support for One Identity Active Roles as the support is pretty limited."
"Most of the time it just works."
"The possibility to request group membership, similar to the past, was disabled and moved to Identity Manager."
"The user interface needs to be more modern and scalable. There are certain screen resolutions where the product is unusable."
"The initial setup was quite easy, but it was time-consuming. It took about three months."
"Customer support is rated six. Sometimes having a fix for a bug takes too much time. While in production, issues tend to take a while to resolve."
"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."
"For ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript."
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"It's fairly priced."
"It's expensive."
"The price is reasonable. It costs us about 1 million Danish kroner annually, and we also spend about half as much on consultants."
"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."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"The product is expensive."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
Regarding the pricing of One Identity Active Roles, it is definitely on the expensive side compared to solutions for what it does. It is a necessary need for us. I don't know One Identity Active Ro...
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
One of the things I would like to see more robust is the change history. One Identity Active Roles can only monitor changes that happen in the console, and the logs don't go back longer than thirty...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Active Roles?
One Identity Active Roles is used for delegated access. It helps with RBAC controls and allows us to manipulate across our facilities which OUs in Active Directory they can manage, along with dynam...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
 

Also Known As

Quest Active Roles
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about One Identity Active Roles vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.