

Symantec Identity Governance and Administration and ForgeRock are prominent players in the identity management sector. ForgeRock appears to offer an edge due to its advanced integration with modern technologies and greater deployment flexibility.
Features: Symantec Identity Governance and Administration enhances user provisioning automation and offers high levels of customization through tools like Connector Express. It seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructure using a broad array of connectors. ForgeRock, however, offers superior integration for IoT, exceptional protocol support, and a codeless modification process. It excels in DevOps readiness and cloud support, providing a versatile platform for management.
Room for Improvement: Symantec encounters criticism for its complex identity manager, requiring specialized expertise and posing challenges in cloud deployment. Its cost and security features are additional points of concern. ForgeRock, while flexible, suffers from customization complexity and cost-related challenges, along with suggestions for a more user-friendly interface and better support model.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Symantec primarily offers on-premises deployment and receives positive customer service feedback, though it's criticized for support delays. ForgeRock offers greater deployment flexibility, accommodating public, hybrid, and on-premises setups. Its customer service, although competent, could benefit from faster technical support, with noted inconsistency compared to Symantec.
Pricing and ROI: Symantec Identity Governance and Administration provides competitive pricing based on user numbers but faces possible cost increases and high implementation fees. Despite this, it is praised for ROI due to its efficient automation capabilities. ForgeRock allows open-source options catering to various budgets, presenting a competitive pricing model that might challenge budgetary flexibility due to additional licensing and support expenses. Both solutions offer considerable ROI through increased productivity and efficiency, albeit with varying financial perceptions among users.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 | 3.7% |
| Symantec Identity Governance and Administration | 2.1% |
| Other | 94.2% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 18 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 23 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 45 |
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."
The Symantec Identity Governance and Administration (formerly CA Identity Suite) provides comprehensive identity management and governance capabilities with a simple, intuitive user experience. This user experience can dramatically simplify processes such as user access requests and access certifications, resulting in improved productivity and user satisfaction. In addition, the Symantec Identity Governance and Administration performs risk analysis and certification and enables remediation actions in real-time during the access provisioning steps, thereby improving audit performance and risk posture with preventive policy enforcement.
While providing these business and governance-centric capabilities for business users, the Symantec Identity Governance and Administration also delivers core enterprise-grade identity management and governance capabilities, including broad provisioning support for on-premise and cloud apps, extensibility and flexibility to integrate with other IT systems and consumer-grade scale. This means organizations are not forced to choose between usability and performance. With the Symantec Identity Governance and Administration, they can have both.
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