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CyberArk Privileged Access Manager pros and cons

Vendor: CyberArk

4.3 out of 5

221 reviews
94% willing to recommend

3,953 followers

Pros & Cons summary

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager automates password management and session monitoring, enhancing security while supporting scalability for account management. It offers strong integration capabilities for diverse platforms but needs improvement in ease of use for non-technical users. Pricing is a concern, and initial setup is complex. Reporting and customization require enhancement. Despite secure session recording and regulatory compliance features, technical support response times affect user experience.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager enhances security by automating password management and session recording, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.

Integrates smoothly with existing infrastructures and provides flexibility, allowing customization and scalability across various platforms.

Facilitates compliance with industry standards through centralized management of privileged accounts, improving auditability and regulatory adherence.

Offers comprehensive threat analytics and artificial intelligence integration to proactively enhance security measures.

Effective at secure credential management, allowing for password rotation and session isolation to maintain security and compliance.

CONS

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is considered too complex and expensive, making it challenging for small and medium-sized businesses.

Integration with other systems and creating an online dashboard remains difficult and requires improvement.

The initial setup and onboarding process are complicated and often require professional consulting services.

Technical support is inadequate, with slow response times and reliance on third-party partners.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager lacks flexibility in its licensing model, making it costly for infrequent users.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Pros review quotes

Core Analyst/ Server Admin at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 19, 2018

CyberArk is not just an IT security or cybersecurity tool. It's also an administrator tool. I had a fair number of systems where the passwords were not fully managed by CyberArk yet, and they were expiring every 30 or 45 days. I was able to get management turned on for those accounts. From an administrator perspective, I didn't have to go back into those systems and manually change those passwords anymore. CyberArk... lightened the load on our administrative work.

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SI

Senior PAM Consultant at iC Consult GmbH

Jan 20, 2025

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager provides granularity. You can break things down into individual safes. You have specific access to safes by individual or group. The interface is with AD, with LDAP, or with local CyberArk passwords. You also have the ability to establish policies for your individual credentials.

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Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jun 21, 2022

I'm no longer the product owner for PAM, but I can say that the most useful feature is the vault functionality, which keeps all your passwords secure in a digital vault.

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CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Free Report: CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

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reviewer1706796

Security Lead at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 29, 2021

We've written over a hundred custom connectors ourselves that allow us to do all types of privileged session management for various applications. On top of that, the rest of the API-based central credential providers allow us to get away from credentials that may be hard-coded in the script or some application.

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Security Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 18, 2018

It has helped us with our adoption with other teams, and it has also helped us to integrate it at the ground level.

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NM

Information Security Leader at a government with 10,001+ employees

Dec 19, 2021

We also use CyberArk’s Secrets Manager. Because AWS is the biggest area for us, we have accounts in AWS that are being rotated by CyberArk. We also have a manual process for the most sensitive of our AWS accounts, like root accounts. We've used Secrets Manager on those and that has resulted in a significant risk reduction, as well.

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Information security engineer/ business owner

Jul 19, 2018

I love the ability to customize the passwords: the forbidden characters, the length of the password, the number of capital, lowercase, and special characters. You can customize the password so that it tailor fits, for example, mainframes that can't have more than eight characters. You can say, "I want a random password that doesn't have these special characters, but it is exactly eight characters," so that it doesn't throw errors.

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GO

Founder at GoTab IT Risk Services

Dec 30, 2019

CyberArk is a very stable product and it's a stable product because it has a simple design and a simple architecture that allows you to leverage the economies of scale across the base of your infrastructure that you already have implemented. It doesn't really introduce any new complex pieces of infrastructure that would make it that much more difficult to scale.

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MM

Miguel Angel Muñoz

Security Advisory Services (SAS) Business Growth Lead for Iberia at DXC

Dec 23, 2021

It is a single tool that isolates possible kinds of malware. You get lateral movement blocking and auditing information, e.g., you know who is doing what. You are getting protections from the service as well as a useful environment. All your admins can easily go in and out of your company while accessing your servers in a secure way, even if they are working abroad.

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reviewer2620185

IT Cyber Security Lead at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 20, 2024

The session recording and monitoring capabilities are valuable. We have real-time session management ability to record, audit, and monitor any privileged user activities. That is a big deal.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 183)

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Cons review quotes

Core Analyst/ Server Admin at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 19, 2018

This is probably a common thing, but they do ask for a lot of log files, a lot of information. They ask you to provide a lot of information to them before they're willing to give you anything at all upfront. It would be better if they were a little more give-and-take upfront: "Why don't you try these couple of things while we take your log files and stuff and go research them?" A little bit of that might be more helpful.

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SI

Senior PAM Consultant at iC Consult GmbH

Jan 20, 2025

CyberArk reporting is notoriously poor, offering about 5 reports out of the box. I am certified in Delinea, which includes 60 reports plus a custom report generator out of the box. Improved reporting would be beneficial.

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Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jun 21, 2022

When I was a component owner for PAM's Privileged Threat Analytics (PTA) component, what I wanted was a clear mapping to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a framework which has a comprehensive list of use cases. We reached out to the vendor and asked them how much coverage they have of the uses cases found on MITRE, which would have given us a better view of things while I was the product owner. Unfortunately they did not have the capability of mapping onto MITRE's framework at that time.

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CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Free Report: CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1706796

Security Lead at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 29, 2021

Many of the infrastructure folks who use the product dislike it because it complicates their workflow. They get a little less control, and they have to go through a specific solution. It proactively logs in for them, which obfuscates some of the issues that they may be troubleshooting.

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Security Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 18, 2018

Having a centralized place to manage the solution has been something that I have always wanted, and they are starting to understand that and bring things back together.

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NM

Information Security Leader at a government with 10,001+ employees

Dec 19, 2021

If there is an area that has room for improvement, it's probably working with their support and getting people on the phone. That is hard to do with most products in general, but that seems to be the difficult area. The product is fantastic, but sometimes we want somebody on the phone.

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Information security engineer/ business owner

Jul 19, 2018

We had an issue with the Copy feature... Apparently, in version 10, that Copy feature does not work. You actually have to click Show and then copy the password from within Show and then paste it. We've had a million tickets and we had to figure out a workaround to it.

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GO

Founder at GoTab IT Risk Services

Dec 30, 2019

CyberArk has to continue to evolve with that threat landscape to make sure that they're still protecting those credentials that are owned by those that have privileged accounts in the firms.

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MM

Miguel Angel Muñoz

Security Advisory Services (SAS) Business Growth Lead for Iberia at DXC

Dec 23, 2021

They are sometimes not flexible with things. For instance, from one day to another, there might be something that had been done years ago by CyberArk, then they say, "We do not support that." You then have to initiate a complaint and start working with them. Things might become complicated and months pass while you are working with them. Usually, they are good and fast, but sometimes they seem to be blocked with problems, e.g., you will suddenly be working with another team instead of the team that you were working with the day before.

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reviewer2620185

IT Cyber Security Lead at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 20, 2024

CyberArk has brought a feature called Vendor Team Manager, but it does not provide full access. It requires the vendor team leader to be onboarded as a local account instead of using their email address. Improvements could be made to onboard the vendor team leaders using their email, allowing them to manage their own team. That would greatly reduce the overhead in managing vendor team members.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 174)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Privileged Access Management (PAM)

User Activity Monitoring

Enterprise Password Managers

Mainframe Security

Operational Technology (OT) Security

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See all alternatives

Product Categories

Product Categories

Privileged Access Management (PAM)

User Activity Monitoring

Enterprise Password Managers

Mainframe Security

Operational Technology (OT) Security

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Okta Workforce Identity vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Saviynt vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Delinea Secret Server vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

CyberArk Endpoint Privilege Manager vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

BeyondTrust Endpoint Privilege Management vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

WALLIX Bastion vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

One Identity Safeguard vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

BeyondTrust Password Safe vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Silverfort vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

ARCON Privileged Access Management vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

ManageEngine PAM360 vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Delinea Privileged Access Service vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Teleport vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

Fudo PAM vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager

See all alternatives

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