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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
92
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) (32nd)
 

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 11.8%, up 10.1% 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 0.5% since last year.
Active Directory Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Active Roles by One Identity11.8%
Netwrix Auditor10.2%
ManageEngine ADManager Plus8.6%
Other69.4%
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 Identity4.4%
Other86.0%
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 by One Identity has positively impacted my organization by helping us make user access more consistent, reliable, and easier to manage, so our team spends less time on manual permission changes."
"Active Roles by One Identity has significantly reduced the complexity and workload of Active Directory administration by automating many tasks that previously required manual effort, allowing our IT team to spend much less time on routine requests and focus on higher-value projects."
"It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
"After moving to One Identity Active Roles, we automated many of the routine processes and introduced delegated administration, which significantly reduced the workload of non-senior administrators."
"One Identity Active Roles has a positive impact on our organization by improving the efficiency and consistency of our Active Directory operations."
"One Identity Active Roles has positively impacted our organization by making Active Directory management much more efficient, reducing manual work, improving control over permissions, and providing better visibility into changes, which has helped both security and compliance efforts."
"One aspect of my experience using Active Roles by One Identity that I want to emphasize is that I truly appreciate how it centralizes and automates identity management instead of relying on extensive manual Active Directory administration."
"Overall, One Identity Active Roles has led to roughly a 40 to 60 percent reduction in AD-related service desk tickets and manual effort, with user onboarding tasks dropping from 15 to 20 minutes down to just a few minutes through automation and templates, adding up to dozens of IT hours saved every month and enabling the same team to manage more users without additional headcount."
"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."
"HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility."
 

Cons

"The initial setup could be simpler because sometimes it feels like it should be more straightforward."
"One Identity Active Roles is very helpful, but a few improvements could make it even better, such as simplifying the user interface to make it more user-friendly, especially for new users, and making setup and configuration easier."
"The way you can search groups could be better."
"Active Roles could add more options for web customization. Our requirements are exceedingly specific. We'd like to get the web interface down to just five buttons, but in some cases, we can only get to six. The web interface in the current version is less customizable than in the previous one."
"There are areas for improvement in One Identity Active Roles that include updating the web interface, creating an API accessible from the web, and improving overall performance, as it can be slow at times."
"The initial setup and configuration can be complex, especially when designing workflows, policies, and delegation models."
"If One Identity Active Roles has to be positioned for all customers, not just the entities which are being regulated, then the pricing has to be normalized."
"The tool has limited scope for improvements from what I have used thus far."
"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

"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."
"It's expensive."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
26%
Healthcare Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business98
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise46
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
To improve Active Roles by One Identity, I would like to see more automation around role assignment and access reviews, along with better reporting and an easier-to-use dashboard. While the integra...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Active Roles?
My main use case for Active Roles by One Identity involves managing user access and roles across different applications while ensuring users have the right permissions based on their responsibiliti...
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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, Netwrix, Microsoft and others in Active Directory Management. Updated: October 2026.
919,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.