

ForgeRock and F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) are both solutions in the identity and access management domain. ForgeRock holds an edge in user-friendliness and integration, while F5 BIG-IP APM is known for its security features and reliability.
Features: ForgeRock offers comprehensive identity management features, seamless integration capabilities, and effective handling of complex environments. F5 BIG-IP APM provides robust security policies, advanced application access control, and granular options to protect resources.
Room for Improvement: ForgeRock could benefit from better technical support, more detailed documentation, and simplifying the implementation of complex features. F5 BIG-IP APM needs to enhance its reporting capabilities, simplify the initial setup process, and improve ease of use.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: ForgeRock users report quicker deployment times but slower customer support. F5 BIG-IP APM users experience more time-consuming deployment due to a steeper learning curve but have responsive and helpful customer service.
Pricing and ROI: ForgeRock is considered cost-effective with good ROI due to its features and capabilities. F5 BIG-IP APM has higher pricing but is seen as justifying the cost with its extensive security features and long-term reliability.
On a B2B level, it opened up the market for TomTom to sell its services in a more efficient way to car companies.
We can use a Linux image from ForgeRock with different systems, applications, websites, and mobile apps to create various types of access for users.
I can definitely see that fewer employees are needed compared to using different SaaS applications.
Even if they respond, they don't update me with the process or what's going on.
Most of the technical support is managed in-house due to our extensive experience with F5 products.
F5 technical support is responsive and helpful.
The support portals offer comprehensive documentation, troubleshooting guides, and community forums that have been helpful for resolving common issues independently.
For standard support tickets, response times were very decent, and the support team was helpful in identifying configuration issues, especially with authentication trees, token settings, and directory replications.
The customer support is very flexible and supportive, particularly in the area of automation and customer deployments.
The product's flexibility and company culture contribute to resolving these challenges.
I would rate the scalability of F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) between seven and eight.
The access management layer is stateless, so I can scale horizontally by adding more nodes behind a load balancer as traffic increases.
The platform provides flexible authentication trees, enabling us to design custom MFA flows tailored for different user groups and risk profiles.
We scaled up with ForgeRock. My team received an award for implementing it for a 60 million customer base, which was the largest implementation at that time.
On a scale from one to ten for stability, I would rate F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) a ten.
Sometimes, the logs are not quite informational or easy to understand.
ForgeRock supports integration with legacy systems in our organization by offering a wide range of connectors and APIs.
ForgeRock is very stable because it manages access, authentication, and authorization effectively.
If I could copy and paste objects instead of picking and configuring them from scratch each time, it would be great.
The main improvement needed for F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is to integrate into the cloud-delivered services from F5.
The ability to run the Anycast feature would be valuable, as the current solution only operates on-premises.
ForgeRock needs to focus on low-code, no-code solutions that allow for drag-and-drop functionality with good orchestration.
It would be better if they were available for support whenever the customer needs it, especially during migration or go-live time periods.
The main area is complexity. ForgeRock is extremely flexible, but the learning curve can be steep.
F5 products are more expensive than other solutions but are valued for their quality and reliability.
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing are very straightforward, which is a good success.
One has to spend considerable time trying to understand the different modules and different needs for those modules on the licensing front.
APM is quite flexible for customers to use, providing secure remote access through various host-checking conditions for both machines and users.
It provides robust security and offers integration with multi-factor authentication systems, which is crucial for an organization's security policy.
A lot of features are useful to me, including mostly the authentication, SAML, or SSO, with no sign-on.
Centralized management makes the biggest difference because it allows us to define, update, and enforce security and compliance rules from a single location.
ForgeRock positively impacts our organization as we manage a large number of users with ease, providing a standard IAM solution that simplifies our processes.
ForgeRock has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to migrate from the older system to the newer ForgeRock component, enabling us to go live with many products across geographies, enhancing security as it is all cloud-based, and with the company taking care of availability, it has reduced costs for the company.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| ForgeRock | 5.2% |
| F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) | 2.2% |
| Other | 92.6% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 9 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 9 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 18 |
F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is an access management proxy solution for managing global access to the enterprise networks, cloud providers, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Through a single management interface, BIG-IP APM consolidates remote, mobile, network, virtual, and web access.
BIG-IP APM can also serve as a bridge between modern and classic authentication and authorization protocols and methods. For applications which are unable to support modern authentication and authorization protocols, like SAML and OAuth with OIDC, but which do support classic authentication methods, BIG-IP APM converts user credentials to the appropriate authentication standard supported by the application.
BIG-IP APM Benefits:
BIG-IP APM Features:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by BIG-IP APM users.
Mahmmoud Rabie, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, writes that BIG-IP APM is "A highly stable solution for load balancing, but the initial setup is complex."
Clyde Livingston, Senior Process Specialist at Telstra, says that BIG-IP APM is "Easy to use, useful access remotely, but lacking stability."
Chris Lam, Senior Solution Consultant at Macroview Telecom Limited, states that BIG-IP APM is "Useful for remote access VPN and VPI integration with VMware.
ForgeRock is a comprehensive open-source identity and access management solution designed to meet the unique needs of your users and workforce. With ForgeRock you can orchestrate, manage, and secure the complete lifecycle of identities in any cloud or hybrid environment. ForgeRock allows you to set up bot detection, identity proofing, and risk-based authentication.
With ForgeRock, you can define access policies and automate the management of the identity lifecycle all from a central, easy to use, and graphical dashboard. ForgeRock Access Management allows you to build safe authentication using options like passwordless and usernameless logins, single sign-on, biometrics, contextual analytics, and behavioral authentication. When threats appear, you can swiftly change how your users access your most sensitive applications and provide users with secure access to the applications, systems, and resources they need on demand.
ForgeRock Benefits and Key Features
Reviews from Real Users
ForgeRock stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust identity and access tools and its being easy to manage and scale with one central dashboard.
PeerSpot users note the effectiveness of these features. A technology solutions leader at an outsourcing company writes, “We need it for multiple clients, multiple implementations. Not all of them are necessarily a multi-tenant solution. We need a very versatile solution that can do a lot of work, but from a single instance that we can centralize authentications and we don't duplicate the efforts and that's where ForgeRock seems to do better.”
Mohamed B., a cyber security consultant at a tech company, writes, "Their access management solution, OpenAM, is most valuable because it meets the needs of a lot of users. ForgeRock secured our system so that it is accessed only by authorized people, and it implemented the SSO."
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