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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 (20th), Server Monitoring (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Active Directory Management category, the mindshare of One Identity Active Roles is 9.5%, up from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.2%, down from 1.6% 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.
VIVEK PATHAK - PeerSpot reviewer
Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring
My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The access templates help set up granular permissions and the web portal to manage Active Directory."
"It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
"Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome."
"It is an easier way for me to manage Active Directory with more advanced features."
"The best part of this Active Roles is the workflow engine. It features an industry-leading workflow automation feature. It's a visual PowerShell that allows task interruption."
"It's valuable to us in that it resembles the native tools that most people have grown accustomed to... Active Roles resembles traditional tools, such as from Microsoft. That is really good because it eases the way people interact with the tool."
"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."
"The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
 

Cons

"In terms of improvement, it could be made even more user-friendly for administrators when they need to create new workflows and rule sets."
"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."
"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 the AAD management feature, it needs to improve the objects that we can manage and the security."
"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 ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript."
"Additional documentation about the Angular web interface is needed."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"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 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."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
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: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.