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One Identity Active Roles vs SolarWinds Access Rights Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 9, 2024

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

One Identity Active Roles
Ranking in Active Directory Management
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (5th), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (4th)
SolarWinds Access Rights Ma...
Ranking in Active Directory Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Active Directory Management category, the mindshare of One Identity Active Roles is 10.2%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Access Rights Manager is 5.8%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Active Directory Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
One Identity Active Roles10.2%
SolarWinds Access Rights Manager5.8%
Other84.0%
Active Directory Management
 

Featured Reviews

Grzegorz Kosela - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Rafal-Stas - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good pricing options and is easy to manage and deploy
It's pretty easy to manage, and quite easy to deploy. It's easy to understand to work, and customers also tell us that there are a lot of options even too many sometimes for them. Sometimes the product is even too big for them at the beginning. The product also has a good payload with pricing. That's why the customers choose this solution. The price and the quality and options have a good ratio.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system."
"The biggest thing for us is Active Roles saves a lot of man-hours in keeping groups up-to-date manually or trying to write some sort of script that you have to run, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Instead of when every time somebody joins a department, then somebody has to remember to put in a request to add "meet user Joe" to this group, the solution does it automatically for us. Therefore, it saves our business and IT staff time because they do not have to process requests since Active Role can do it for them."
"Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome."
"The AD and AAD management features of this solution are really good... They offer added value by showing more fields such as password age and the statuses of some things that we normally wouldn't see."
"It is very intuitive and close to the native tools. Since it is web-based, it does not require extensive training for our end users."
"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."
"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."
"It's valuable to us in that it resembles the native tools that most people have grown accustomed to... Active Roles resembles traditional tools, such as from Microsoft. That is really good because it eases the way people interact with the tool."
"The solution can be used to audit the whole on-premises environment, including Active Directory, file servers, and other Microsoft services."
"It's pretty easy to manage, and quite easy to deploy."
 

Cons

"There is always room to improve the user interface for increased clarity. I believe enhancements to the console are also necessary because it is more confusing than the web interface."
"It also has workflows and those are really powerful, but there are no built-in workflows. When it comes to them, it's empty. I would personally love for it to come with ten, 15, or 20 workflows where each achieves a certain task... I could just look at how each is done, clone them, copy them, modify them the way I want them, and be good to go. Right now we have to invent things from scratch."
"There are areas for improvement in One Identity Active Roles that include updating the web interface, creating an API accessible from the web, and improving overall performance, as it can be slow at times."
"The way you can search groups could be better."
"In terms of improvement, it could be made even more user-friendly for administrators when they need to create new workflows and rule sets."
"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."
"The solution needs an attestation process that includes certification and recertification attestation."
"When doing a workflow, we would like a bit better feedback on the screen, as we're trying to get it to work. For example, there is a "Find" function that you need set up in a workflow to do some of the automation. It is not the easiest to get a result from those finds when you're trying to do that. In the MMC, they have a couple different types of workflows. In this particular case, we use their workflow functionality to find all of X within the environment, then if you find it, do X, Y, and Z. You can have multiple steps. When you do that search function within that workflow, it's really hard to find out, "Is my search working?" It would be nice if there was some feedback on the screen so you could see if your search is working properly within the workflow."
"The GUI could be improved because this GUI was invented ten years ago, and now we have a modern user interface. This GUI is a bit older than expected in this market."
"Configuring the solution with online services, like Microsoft Exchange Online, is difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive."
"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 is on the higher end."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"It's fairly priced."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"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 pricing of the solution is fine. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"The pricing of the solution is fine. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Retailer
9%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise17
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
The product is expensive, but if you want to save money, the delegation set-up process is quite easy. After setting up Active Roles once, defining the delegation model, it is very efficient, almost...
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
One area for improvement would be the Entra ID side, including better delegation for Entra ID objects and more granular permissions. We would also like to see better Entra ID license management usi...
What do you like most about SolarWinds Access Rights Manager?
It's pretty easy to manage, and quite easy to deploy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Access Rights Manager?
The pricing of the solution is fine. I rate the pricing a five out of ten.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Access Rights Manager?
First configuration may be difficult if you didn't deep dive into documentation. I recommend contacting some partners to help you deploy it in your environment.
 

Also Known As

Quest Active Roles
SolarWinds ARM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Accenture, Emerson, Lockheed Martin, Nielsen, NTT
Find out what your peers are saying about One Identity Active Roles vs. SolarWinds Access Rights Manager and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.