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

 

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
90
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 12.3%, up 6.5% 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 0.3% since last year.
Active Directory Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
One Identity Active Roles12.3%
Netwrix Auditor10.7%
ManageEngine ADManager Plus9.8%
Other67.2%
Active Directory Management
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager1.0%
Idira Privileged Access Manager9.9%
One Identity Safeguard4.4%
Other84.7%
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
 

Featured Reviews

Varun Mehra - PeerSpot reviewer
collaboration support engineer at a retailer with 11-50 employees
Automation has transformed onboarding and access control and now streamlines daily governance
While One Identity Active Roles is a strong identity and access management solution overall, there are a few areas where it could improve. One challenge we experienced was the initial setup and configuration complexity. Deploying workflows, policies, and delegation models require careful planning and a good understanding of the Active Directory environment. For organizations without experienced administrators, the learning curve can feel quite steep in the beginning. The user interface could also be more modern and intuitive. Some administrative tasks require navigating through multiple menus and the overall experience could be simplified for faster day-to-day management. Another area for improvement is reporting and customization. While the auditing features are good, creating highly customized reports sometimes requires additional efforts or scripting knowledge. More built-in reporting templates and easier dashboard customization would be helpful. We have also noticed that troubleshooting workflows or synchronization issues can occasionally take time because the logs can be very detailed and technical. Better diagnostic tools and simpler error explanations would improve the operational experience. That said, once the platform is properly configured and maintained, it performs reliably and delivers strong automation, delegation, and governance capabilities. One additional area where One Identity Active Roles could improve is cloud integration and hybrid environment management. While it works well with Active Directory and the Microsoft environment, organizations moving heavily towards cloud-first infrastructure may want even deeper and more seamless integration with modern SaaS platforms and identity providers. Performance optimization in large environments could be improved. In very large enterprise deployments with complex workflows and multiple managed domains, some administrative actions and synchronization tasks can occasionally feel slower than expected. Another point is documentation and onboarding resources. The product is feature-rich, but some advanced configurations require going through extensive documentation. More practical examples, guided setup wizards, and easier to follow best practice guides would help new administrators adopt the platform faster. Overall, the core functionality is solid, and most of the pain points are related more to usability, complexity, and modernization rather than the reliability. One additional improvement I would mention is around integration flexibility with third-party ITSM and DevOps tools. While the platform integrates well within Microsoft-centric environments, broader out-of-the-box integration and simpler API workflows for non-Microsoft ecosystems would make deployment and automation easier for organizations using diverse infrastructure. Another area is upgrade and migration simplicity. In enterprise environments, version upgrades and environment migration sometimes require careful planning and testing. Streamlining that process with more automated compatibility checks and migration assistance would reduce operational overhead.
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

"One Identity Active Roles has had a strong impact on Active Directory operations by reducing manual administrative workload, improving access governance, and standardizing provisioning and permission management procedures."
"Active Roles is a thousand times better than native Microsoft tools."
"One Identity Active Roles brings a positive impact to organizations in that they will start realizing the ROI in a much faster manner because the implementation time is very short and it is easy to use."
"The return on investment from One Identity Active Roles has been incredibly clear and measurable for us, with the efficiency in user provisioning and offboarding, which used to take almost 24 to 48 hours due to a multi-step process, now down to just 5 minutes, and a nearly 80% drop in ticket escalation queues after safely delegating tasks to the help desk through clean access templates."
"One Identity Active Roles has reduced a significant amount of manual AD admin work, improved security through tighter access control, and made onboarding and offboarding much faster and more consistent across teams."
"One Identity Active Roles has helped us improve security with smooth processes."
"The positive impact is that it saved time, improved security, and made things more efficient."
"Overall, the return on investment comes from time savings, reduced errors, better resource utilization, and improved compliance, which together justify the investment."
"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 way you can search groups could be better."
"One area for improvement would be troubleshooting and reporting."
"Another issue we have with the product is that we run a lot of custom tasks. You have to program them to run on one particular host and there's no automatic failover to a second host. If that host is down when a task is supposed to run, it has to wait until the next time it runs when that host is up."
"Overall, I had a good experience with One Identity Active Roles, but there are a few areas where it could be improved."
"One area that could be improved in One Identity Active Roles is the user interface and initial configuration process, as some advanced workflows and policy settings can be complex for new administrators."
"One Identity Active Roles could be improved by speeding up the approval process, especially for urgent access requests."
"One Identity Active Roles can be improved by modernizing the core user interface and simplifying the initial setup and policy workflow conversion."
"There are a couple of areas where One Identity Active Roles can be improved. One area is the overall user interface and experience, as the UI is sometimes very complex, so simplifying workflows for non-stakeholders would be helpful."
"I would not necessarily recommend customers use it."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's fairly priced."
"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."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"It's expensive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business97
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise45
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
I wasn't directly involved in the pricing or licensing decisions, so I cannot comment on the exact cost. For our operations, I believe the investment was considered worthwhile because the product r...
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
I think One Identity Active Roles is a mature and reliable solution, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. The biggest one is the management interface, which feels dated compared to...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Active Roles?
Our main use case for One Identity Active Roles is to simplify and standardize Active Directory administration across multiple business units while reducing the amount of manual work handled by our...
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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: July 2026.
906,852 professionals have used our research since 2012.