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Active Roles by One Identity vs Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Active Roles by One Identity
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (3rd), Active Directory Management (1st), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (1st)
Fortra's Powertech Identity...
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (33rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Identity and Access Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Active Roles by One Identity is designed for Active Directory Management and holds a mindshare of 11.7%, up 9.6% compared to last year.
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager, on the other hand, focuses on Privileged Access Management (PAM), holds 1.0% mindshare, up 0.4% since last year.
Active Directory Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Active Roles by One Identity11.7%
Netwrix Auditor10.1%
ManageEngine ADManager Plus8.7%
Other69.5%
Active Directory Management
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager1.0%
Idira Privileged Access Manager8.6%
Safeguard by One Identity4.3%
Other86.1%
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
 

Featured Reviews

Puru Solanki ( ITIL. CISM , CCSP ) - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Head at Citadel Global
Automation has streamlined onboarding and governance and delivers faster, more secure access
Overall, we are very satisfied with Active Roles by One Identity, but there are a few areas that could be improved. The user interface could be more modern and intuitive, especially for new administrators. Some advanced configuration and policy settings have a steep learning curve and could be simplified. We would also like to see more built-in integrations with cloud platforms and SaaS applications, along with additional out-of-the-box reporting templates. These improvements would make the product even easier and more flexible for organizations managing hybrid environments. One thing that would make our daily work even smoother is having more ready-to-use templates for common administrative tasks and reports. This would reduce the need for customization and help teams get up and running more quickly. Additionally, faster and simpler synchronization for hybrid and cloud environments would be beneficial, especially for organizations managing both on-premises and cloud identities. More detailed documentation and guided setup for advanced features would help new administrators learn the platform faster and more easily. One additional improvement I would like to see for Active Roles by One Identity is a better built-in dashboard with more real-time insights into identity and access activities. It would be helpful if upgrades and migrations were simpler and required less planning. Finally, expanding native integrations with more cloud services and third-party applications would make the platform even more versatile and reliable. These enhancements would improve the overall user experience while keeping the product's strong security and automation capabilities.
reviewer910470 - PeerSpot reviewer
Practice Lead at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Inexperienced support for old product, but good flexibility for use case customization
HelpSystems Powertech is scalable if you throw more servers at it. Then you can distribute the load, which is a Microsoft SQL Server backend, and as long as you allocate enough resources to those things, then it is scalable. That's good enough. It would be an entire organization that uses it. So at a hospital for example, a healthcare system, a bank, and it would be the entire workforce on it. I haven't see a lot of customer's specific use cases, but it is for the whole workforce, everyone. The CEO of the company to the janitor. In terms of maintaining it, that requires application administrators or system administrators. There is a manual process to update the product, at least with the on-premise version.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Active Roles helped reduce our identity-based breaches."
"One Identity Active Roles has made things more organized and secure across the company, and it has also reduced the need to contact IT administrators directly, saving time for both me and the IT staff."
"One Identity Active Roles has positively impacted my organization by reducing a lot of manual AD administration work, improving access control, and helping standardize user management processes across the organization."
"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."
"One Identity Active Roles has positively impacted our organization by simplifying Active Directory administration and reducing the amount of manual work required for user and access management."
"We have definitely seen a strong return on investment after implementing One Identity Active Roles, mainly in terms of time saving, reduced workload, and improved efficiency, where user provisioning and access requests that earlier took hours are now completed in a few minutes through automation, and we observe around a 40 to 50% reduction in service desk tickets related to Active Directory tasks, which allows the team to focus on more critical activities instead of repetitive work, while delegation reduces dependency on senior administrators, indirectly saving manpower effort, and overall, the reduction in errors, faster onboarding, and improved compliance also contribute to cost savings and operational efficiency, making it a valuable investment for the organization."
"It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
"One Identity Active Roles provides strong automation capabilities that significantly reduce manual administrative work, with one especially helpful example being automated employee onboarding, where user accounts, group membership, permissions, and mailbox access are assigned automatically based on the employee's department or role."
"HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility."
"HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility. It is able to be extended. A lot of the products these days, especially the ones on the cloud, are limited and can't handle all the use cases. Often there is not even a way to customize the application to meet uncommon use cases and HelpSystems provides an infrastructure that lends itself to the ability to be customized."
 

Cons

"The user interface needs to be more modern and scalable. There are certain screen resolutions where the product is unusable."
"One Identity Active Roles does not require many improvements, but for upcoming or new users, there should be an easier initial setup and configuration."
"The main improvement I would like to see for One Identity Active Roles is a more modern and intuitive interface, along with more customizable reporting and dashboards to enhance our experience with the platform."
"One Identity Active Roles can be improved, as the user interface could be more modernized and the reporting and analytics feature could be enhanced."
"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."
"One specific issue I have encountered recently is that the interface and workflow configuration can become complex and less intuitive, especially when managing multiple approval steps or modifying existing workflows, which sometimes requires deeper scripting or backend adjustments, so more user-friendly and visual workflow design would be a great improvement."
"Many users feel the user interface is not very modern or intuitive, and it can take time to get used to navigating the console and workflows."
"The initial setup of One Identity Active Roles can be more simplified."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the support of the product. It's hard to get support for it. I think this is emblematic of the fact that they don't have a lot of employees who have long-term experience with it."
"I would not necessarily recommend customers use it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's fairly priced."
"It's expensive."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
28%
Healthcare Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business100
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise45
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
Our experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Active Roles by One Identity has been very positive. Although Active Roles by One Identity is not the lowest-priced solution, we believ...
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
Overall, we are very satisfied with Active Roles by One Identity, but there are a few areas that could be improved. The user interface could be more modern and intuitive, especially for new adminis...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Active Roles?
Active Roles by One Identity is our main solution for simplifying and automating user account management in our Active Directory environment. We use it for tasks like user provisioning, deprovision...
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Also Known As

Quest Active Roles
HelpSystems Powertech Identity & Access Manager, Powertech Identity & Access Manager, BoKS, BoKS ServerControl, Fox Technologies ApplicationControl, ApplicationControl
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Integris Health
Find out what your peers are saying about One Identity, Microsoft, Netwrix and others in Active Directory Management. Updated: August 2026.
913,076 professionals have used our research since 2012.