Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users
One Identity Active Roles Logo

One Identity Active Roles pros and cons

Vendor: One Identity
4.2 out of 5
Badge Ranked 1

Pros & Cons summary

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.
Get the report

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

One Identity Active Roles automates repetitive tasks, increasing operational efficiency and saving time for IT teams.
It provides attribute-level control and enhances AD management features, offering insights into password age and statuses.
The change history feature allows centralized management of Active Directory domains, aiding in auditing and troubleshooting.
Leveraging the sync service, it enables importing information from external systems, improving user group consistency.
Active Roles reduces identity-based breaches and enhances security by managing privileged accounts and ensuring role-based access control.

CONS

One Identity Active Roles can improve by providing built-in workflows to simplify implementation and reduce the need for customization.
Integration with Azure and enhancing cloud capabilities is challenging and requires extensive support, which can be time-consuming and costly.
The workflow engine is not intuitive and offers limited feedback, creating difficulties in monitoring search functions and automation tasks.
Lack of automatic failover for custom tasks poses a risk of delays when the designated host is unavailable.
Comprehensive support, including integration capabilities and dynamic group processing, needs improvement to enhance performance and functionality.
 

One Identity Active Roles Pros review quotes

SP
Managing Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Jul 9, 2018
Heavily Automates - it will automate the entire provisioning, re-provisioning, de-provisioning and undo-de-provisioning tasks Complete Audit Trail - it gives an audit trail for each and every activity Increase in accountability – various tasks can be enabled for approval.
reviewer708018 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Aug 29, 2017
Operational issues are much easier and more reliable with Quest ActiveRoles's directory layer and portal.
it_user749199 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Oct 16, 2017
It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system.
Learn what your peers think about One Identity Active Roles. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.
MS
Technical Manager of Security at Liberty Global
Apr 3, 2019
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.
Identity0bf3 - PeerSpot reviewer
Identity Senior Analyst at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees
Apr 4, 2019
It gives us attribute-level control and the AD management features work very well.
DF
CTO at BeClever
Apr 10, 2019
The provisioning and deprovisioning saves a lot of time and skips a lot of errors.
WC
Director Identity & Access Management at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Oct 9, 2019
Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome.
reviewer1425105 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Lead, Security services at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees
Sep 23, 2020
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.
reviewer1430811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Manager at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Oct 4, 2020
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.
Kiril - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Manager at Toronto District School Board
Oct 8, 2020
Because of Active Roles, we're able to synchronize on an even more regular basis. It enables us to provide even more information to the Active Directory, which helped us to group our users in a more consistent manner.
 

One Identity Active Roles Cons review quotes

SP
Managing Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Jul 9, 2018
Web console – it should have more customization options in terms of look and feel of the landing page.
reviewer708018 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Aug 29, 2017
Scripting options in different languages.
it_user749199 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Oct 16, 2017
For ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript.
Learn what your peers think about One Identity Active Roles. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.
MS
Technical Manager of Security at Liberty Global
Apr 3, 2019
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.
Identity0bf3 - PeerSpot reviewer
Identity Senior Analyst at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees
Apr 4, 2019
Most of the time it just works.
DF
CTO at BeClever
Apr 10, 2019
For the AAD management feature, it needs to improve the objects that we can manage and the security.
WC
Director Identity & Access Management at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Oct 9, 2019
The ability to send logs to a SIEM would be very beneficial.
reviewer1425105 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Lead, Security services at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees
Sep 23, 2020
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.
reviewer1430811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Manager at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Oct 4, 2020
The third area for improvement, which is the weakest portion of ARS, is the workflow engine, which was introduced a few years ago. It's slow and not very intuitive to use, so I would like to see improvement there.
Kiril - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Manager at Toronto District School Board
Oct 8, 2020
In terms of improvement, it could be made even more user-friendly for administrators when they need to create new workflows and rule sets.