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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
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (5th), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (5th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Active Directory Management
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (18th), Server Monitoring (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Active Directory Management category, the mindshare of One Identity Active Roles is 6.9%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.1%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Active Directory Management
 

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.
Carlos Camargo - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides user-friendly API features and has straightforward deployment process
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when adding new modules or additional pollers. Additionally, the granularity of polling times for specific components could be enhanced to better meet individual customers' needs without impacting the entire polling pool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Active Roles is easy to configure. It isn't a plug-and-play solution, and you need expertise to set it up. However, once you have your templates, it's easy to deploy in a highly decentralized environment. The custom configuration for our customers is fantastic, especially the web interface."
"The provisioning and deprovisioning saves a lot of time and skips a lot of errors."
"Secure access is the most valuable feature."
"The solution improved our organization's security posture by framing the end users and ensuring that capabilities that could cause mistakes are hidden from the web interface."
"Because of Active Roles, we're able to synchronize on an even more regular basis. It enables us to provide even more information to the Active Directory, which helped us to group our users in a more consistent manner."
"Active Roles helped increase operational efficiency in our organization."
"The access templates help set up granular permissions and the web portal to manage Active Directory."
"Instead of deleting accounts, we like the deprovision option so that we can reverse any accidental deletions. It also gives a higher level of quality control in terms of enforcing any number of variables, such as making sure that an account has a description entered before the account can be created. We can backtrack and know the history of it that way."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"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 most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
 

Cons

"The ability to send logs to a SIEM would be very beneficial."
"I've had a difficult time getting it to cooperate with Azure in the cloud and, while the support staff are very good and very knowledgeable, what they assist with just on a call doesn't go deep enough to help with a number of issues. The answer that comes back is that we'd have to start an engagement with Professional Services, which is fine but that takes time to schedule and it takes budget."
"The initial setup was quite easy, but it was time-consuming. It took about three months."
"The user interface needs to be more modern and scalable. There are certain screen resolutions where the product is unusable."
"I know they have increased support for Entra ID and mentioned providing support for AWS. A way to connect to various directories and integrate with cloud directories would be beneficial."
"For ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript."
"The third area for improvement, which is the weakest portion of ARS, is the workflow engine, which was introduced a few years ago. It's slow and not very intuitive to use, so I would like to see improvement there."
"For mid-sized to small companies, I do not know if it would be that useful, considering the tool's purpose."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"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."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"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."
"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."
"It's fairly priced."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"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."
"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

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: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.