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

Fortra's Powertech Identity...
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (37th)
One Identity Active Roles
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (5th), Active Directory Management (1st), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Identity and Access Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager is designed for Privileged Access Management (PAM) and holds a mindshare of 0.9%, up 0.2% compared to last year.
One Identity Active Roles, on the other hand, focuses on Active Directory Management, holds 11.1% mindshare, up 6.7% since last year.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager0.9%
CyberArk Privileged Access Manager11.2%
Delinea Secret Server5.0%
Other82.9%
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Active Directory Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
One Identity Active Roles11.1%
ManageEngine ADManager Plus11.8%
Netwrix Auditor9.7%
Other67.4%
Active Directory Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Grzegorz Kosela - PeerSpot reviewer
solution architect/ engineer at APEX.IT Sp. z o.o.
Task automation simplifies user and delegation management while offering a customizable interface
Currently, task automation, like provisioning, deprovisioning, and reprovisioning, is very effective. When a user moves from one organization to another, it automatically changes their group membership and performs similar functions. Secondly, the granular delegation feature is very nice and much simpler and easier than it is natively in Microsoft. Two years ago, One Identity Active Roles was under Dell. It was quite poor. However, now, there have been notable improvements, such as faster system processing, better logging, enhanced information, and a more user-friendly interface. Once it was sold by Dell, things got better. The interface became a bit more user-friendly. The Angular user interface is much more flexible for adjusting to customer needs, and a completely new and customizable one can be created, aligning with all settings and scripts required by a customer. The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. The solution's ability to provision and deprovision resources and directories like Azure AD is very simple, especially when you can integrate with the HR system and grab some data from HR. It's actually fully automatic. I don't need to even touch it. It's helped increase operational efficiency by 50%. It's helped decrease security problems around privileged accounts. We were able to decrease the number of privileged accounts and have been able to delegate more effectively. We decreased the number of high-level permissions that administrators had. For example, if someone is a DNS administrator, he has access only as far as the specific actions he needs to handle. We don't need to give away such high privileges for such a daily job. It's helped clarify roles and access. It's helped reduce identity-based breaches. If someone leaves a company, we can easily undo provisioning and close accounts. We can generate reports to see which people have which permissions and at what times. We've just integrated with our HR system. It helps us follow activated and deactivated users. I'd rate the granular controls on offer ten out of ten. We've saved on manpower in terms of the work of the administrators. There's good reporting and functionality, and it's very transparent. You can connect more than one directory and manage everything from one pane. You can do many things from one interface.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The access templates help set up granular permissions and the web portal to manage Active Directory."
"Active Roles is easy to configure. It isn't a plug-and-play solution, and you need expertise to set it up. However, once you have your templates, it's easy to deploy in a highly decentralized environment. The custom configuration for our customers is fantastic, especially the web interface."
"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."
"Another good feature is the change history. It's centralized in a single place and allows us to manage people's Active Directory domains from a central location. We can also drill down into individual objects in a troubleshooting or even an auditing situation. We can show evidence to auditors by drilling down into the individual history. It gives you all the history of what happened around an individual object. That is something that would be almost impossible to do in Active Directory, or extremely complicated."
"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."
"Instead of deleting accounts, we like the deprovision option so that we can reverse any accidental deletions. It also gives a higher level of quality control in terms of enforcing any number of variables, such as making sure that an account has a description entered before the account can be created. We can backtrack and know the history of it that way."
"Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome."
"With the use of the sync service we were able to import information from multiple external systems and populate them within our space and leverage them for downstream systems."
 

Cons

"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."
"The solution needs an attestation process that includes certification and recertification attestation."
"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."
"When we add numerous domains, it becomes slow. With around 60 domains, attempting to add approximately 30 caused significant performance issues."
"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."
"I have not seen a return on investment or any relevant metrics and I cannot imagine we would have saved any employees or any full-time equivalents for One Identity Active Roles."
"I know they have increased support for Entra ID and mentioned providing support for AWS. A way to connect to various directories and integrate with cloud directories would be beneficial."
"I've had a difficult time getting it to cooperate with Azure in the cloud and, while the support staff are very good and very knowledgeable, what they assist with just on a call doesn't go deep enough to help with a number of issues. The answer that comes back is that we'd have to start an engagement with Professional Services, which is fine but that takes time to schedule and it takes budget."
"For mid-sized to small companies, I do not know if it would be that useful, considering the tool's purpose."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It's expensive."
"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 price is reasonable. It costs us about 1 million Danish kroner annually, and we also spend about half as much on consultants."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"It's fairly priced."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
Regarding the pricing of One Identity Active Roles, it is definitely on the expensive side compared to solutions for what it does. It is a necessary need for us. I don't know One Identity Active Ro...
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
One of the things I would like to see more robust is the change history. One Identity Active Roles can only monitor changes that happen in the console, and the logs don't go back longer than thirty...
What is your primary use case for One Identity Active Roles?
One Identity Active Roles is used for delegated access. It helps with RBAC controls and allows us to manipulate across our facilities which OUs in Active Directory they can manage, along with dynam...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Integris Health
City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Find out what your peers are saying about CyberArk, One Identity, Delinea and others in Privileged Access Management (PAM). Updated: January 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.