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Idira Privileged Access Manager vs Symantec Siteminder 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

Idira Privileged Access Man...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
User Activity Monitoring (2nd), Enterprise Password Managers (3rd), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (1st), Mainframe Security (2nd), Operational Technology (OT) Security (4th)
Symantec Siteminder
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (13th), Web Access Management (1st), Access Management (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

Mahmudul Hoque Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at intelQong Technology
Centralized access has improved privileged control and visibility yet still needs better integrations
While the access control capabilities are useful, streamlining some configuration and policy management workflows could enhance the user experience for administrators. A simpler interface for creating access policies and quickly identifying unusual activities would make day-to-day administration more efficient. Stronger integration with existing identity data and secret management could be a significant improvement for Idira Privileged Access Manager. Deeper integration with cloud solutions would make it easier to correlate privileged access activity with other security events. I would also appreciate more flexible reporting and dashboards so administrators can swiftly see access patterns and unusual privileged access from a single view.
Muzi Lubisi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior technical Consultant at CA Africa
Improved user experience with seamless integration and easy installation
The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows. Additionally, it is very beneficial for deploying single sign-on sessions between different windows on a web browser, provided I am connected to the right identity provider. That seamless integration significantly improves user experience and efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Password Vault is probably the top product in that space, and it's a monster to implement, but CyberArk is great at what they do."
"The credentials management capability is key to ensuring that the credentials are kept secure and that access to them is done on a temporary and event-driven basis."
"Central Password Manager is useful for agentless automated password management through AD integration as well as endpoints for different devices."
"All access to our servers by both staff and vendors is monitored and recorded."
"The ability of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager to safeguard the financial services infrastructure by protecting credentials is extremely important, as every activity in a financial organization needs to be recorded for accountability in auditing."
"Overall, as a partner in our digital transformation, CyberArk has been great."
"The module called PTA, Privileged Threat Analytics, is very useful. When you give access to a user, it monitors and detects if the user's behavior is unusual. After giving access, it continually checks if the user is the same user."
"What I appreciate about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is that it is not only for password security; we can also manage their applications and platforms, and whenever a user logs in, end-to-end protection is handled, including monitoring user activity through PSM servers and reacting to threats with Privileged Threat Analysis."
"SSO affords us the opportunity to have a federated connection between our members, groups, and companies, giving providers the ability to transpose across the different Delta Dentals without having to authenticate more than once with one identity for all sites."
"The solution has features that allow you to easily distinguish between protected and unprotected resources."
"It provides a secure interface and single sign-on to a variety of different applications."
"The most valuable feature is the Federation part of Single Sign On, which is customizable and is easily integrated with any customer application or any third party application."
"We needed to implement secure access, CA is a leader in this area, so we went naturally with the best, and we also chose CA because of the way they interact with customers, pitch new features to us, ask us for feedback, and provide us with support."
"The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with the Active Directory."
"It really improved the speed to market from account creation through provisioning and onboarding, and as users move from system to system, their account access follows them so you don't need to create new credentials every time."
 

Cons

"Pricing is a concern for me because it is not very user-friendly for startups, new users, or very small organizations."
"The scalability, sometimes, is lacking. It works really well for more static environments... But for an environment where you're constantly spinning up new infrastructure or new endpoints, sometimes it has a hard time keeping up."
"As a customer, I might need a plugin for a specific product, or an application, and CyberArk might have already worked with some other client on it. There has to be some platform where it is available for everybody else to go and grab it, instead of my having to reinvent the wheel."
"CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault must incorporate connectors for password and session managers in the marketplace."
"The initial setup could be simplified. Right now, in comparison to its nearest competitors, it's quite complex."
"CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is more expensive than its competitors, such as BeyondTrust, Delinea, and ManageEngine PAM360."
"When I was a component owner for PAM's Privileged Threat Analytics (PTA) component, what I wanted was a clear mapping to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a framework which has a comprehensive list of use cases. We reached out to the vendor and asked them how much coverage they have of the uses cases found on MITRE, which would have given us a better view of things while I was the product owner. Unfortunately they did not have the capability of mapping onto MITRE's framework at that time."
"There are some options in the web portal where they can improve the user experience. For example, in remote, there is a parameter called 'access to remote machine.' When we put host names in that field, we are not able to search it. It"
"The initial setup of Symantec SiteMinder was a bit tricky. I would rate it a seven on a scale of one to ten, where ten indicates an easy setup."
"The installation process was complex. There are a lot of different moving pieces, and the main complaint is that it's hard to automate any of it."
"We are finding some compatibility issues. We're still working with CA on them."
"Some of the new protocols, like OAuth 2.0, could be improved."
"They need to make configurations easier, and not have the engineer having to guess what will happen when he changes a particular setting."
"The technical support could be better."
"Symantec SiteMinder is not easy to set up and maintain at an infrastructure level."
"We had some performance-related issues that caused some outages. Outages actually happened pretty frequently back then."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company always complains about the cost of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager because it's too high."
"The pricing for CyberArk is on the higher side compared to other Privileged Access Management products. Something should be done regarding enterprise licensing for long-standing customers."
"I'm aware that the organization had purchased licensing for almost all of CyberArk's solutions including licensing for PTA, EPM, and the Application Identity Manager. But when it comes to PSM, this is one of the components where there's an additional charge for any extra PSMs that you want to deploy. I believe that there's some rider where the vendor has a bit of leeway to, at times, charge a premium on whatever additional services you may require above the board."
"It's per-company, license-based."
"The pricing is slightly higher compared to other solutions, but it is reasonable because there are better security features."
"CyberArk has been Gartner's number-one pick for the past ten years, so you can infer that their pricing is higher than everyone else. When you are the best, you will charge appropriately for it."
"Overall, its pricing is really good. The main difference from all the other vendors is that they have one package that covers all the functionality and modules of the basic PAM, except the add-on modules like adware and server protection. It also doesn't include the licenses for domain controller protection or maybe an API call-related feature. For the basic privileged access management, the bundle pricing is really good, but when it comes to an agent-based solution for advanced cyber protection or application identity managers, it is expensive. Services are also very expensive if you hire the services team from CyberArk, but these guys are really good. For a couple of large banking projects, we had an experience with them. The banks wanted to have things quickly and efficiently, so we had to hire them. If we take four weeks, these guys can do everything on a weekend. They charge quite a big sum of money, but they know the system well."
"CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault is a very expensive product."
"The licensing is fair for this solution."
"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
"Siteminder is a little costly. You pay for licensing, and they offer packages, so if you have less users, then you have to buy different products at different prices. If you have more of a user base, then the package is different. They also include other features—for example, if you have a database and you're using Siteminder, then it's good to use a Semantic-specific database, but if you are using less, then you have to purchase the database separately. Whereas if you are going for a bigger license, then it comes within the package. It depends on which plan you are using."
"The solution's pricing is competitive."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise43
Large Enterprise175
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise69
 

Questions from the Community

How does Sailpoint IdentityIQ compare with CyberArk PAM?
We evaluated Sailpoint IdentityIQ before ultimately choosing CyberArk. Sailpoint Identity Platform is a solution to manage risks in cloud enterprise environments. It automates and streamlines the m...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
The pricing is reasonable compared to other software options we evaluated, and it is straightforward. However, overall costs depend on deployment size and licensing requirements.
What needs improvement with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
While the access control capabilities are useful, streamlining some configuration and policy management workflows could enhance the user experience for administrators. A simpler interface for creat...
What needs improvement with Symantec Siteminder?
Symantec Siteminder needs to have adaptive authentication and multi-factor authentication as integrated features. Currently, multi-factor authentication is available as a separate solution, and it ...
What is your primary use case for Symantec Siteminder?
I deploy and support Symantec Siteminder ( /products/symantec-siteminder-reviews ). I have been a partner and reseller.
 

Also Known As

CyberArk Privileged Access Security, CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault
SiteMinder, CA SSO, Layer7 SiteMinder
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rockwell Automation
British Telecom, CoreBlox, DBS, HMS, Itera ASA and Simeo
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Okta, One Identity and others in Access Management. Updated: October 2026.
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