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Azure Key Vault vs BeyondTrust Password Safe comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 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

Azure Key Vault
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Certificate Management Software (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (14th)
BeyondTrust Password Safe
Ranking in Enterprise Password Managers
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Enterprise Password Managers category, the mindshare of Azure Key Vault is 27.1%, down from 29.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BeyondTrust Password Safe is 3.7%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Password Managers
 

Featured Reviews

Sweta Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
With a straightforward deployment process, it's a stable solution to store passwords and information
Regarding how extensively it is used in your company, it is used for anything on the cloud where we need any service, especially user-facing ones. Around 800 to 1,000 users in my company use the solution. Also, it is important to note that there are around 150 to 200 people in the technology department.
Gary Jolley - PeerSpot reviewer
Their discovery engine is off the charts, and the ease of administration and implementation they talk about is for real
It starts with discovery. Its number one feature is discovery. The discovery engine in BeyondTrust is off the charts. When they perform a discovery, you know everything there is about a server, including what software is installed. For example, if you want to group all of your database servers together, you can do that by using discovery and Smart Rules. If a server has Microsoft SQL installed, it gets put into a group based on a Smart Rule. It makes it very easy to determine what is what in your environment. As organizations grow or acquire other companies and merge, they lose track of what they have. BeyondTrust can help you throw a rope around it very rapidly. Its user interface is really nice. It is very visual. When you first log in, based on your job role, you see what you have access to when you look at the screen. As an administrator, I see the configuration screen where I can go in and modify Active Directory and authentication connections. I can set up SAML, or I also have access to create Smart Rules. The access is based on the role that you have when you log in. I have six boxes or six categories of administration items, whereas when an admin user connects, he would only have one or two. So, based on your role, you see what you have access to. It is not like you click something and then it fails because you're not an administrator at that level. You actually see what you have access to, and BeyondTrust is very good at that. BeyondTrust provides the ability to connect by using not just the web interface but also the admin tools such as MobaXterm, PuTTY, or a lengthy list of other types of tools. You can use the connection string and connect through BeyondTrust, and it will be session recorded, keystroke logged, and highly available. When you bring up MobaXterm, you probably bring up one of the most complex ones because MobaXterm has the ability to have two, three, or four concurrent connections, which makes BeyondTrust Password Safe ideal. It is very easy to integrate session management into existing business processes. To make it easy for the engineers, we created templates of the connection strings and then used, believe it or not, Microsoft Excel to create custom strings for each of the engineers. We exported them to a text file that they could then import. In the case of PuTTY, because PuTTY stores the connections and the credentials in the registry, we had to do something different there, but the connection string is customizable enough to make the job fast and easily repeatable for all the other engineers. You don't have 20 or 30 engineers spending two or three days creating all these connection strings. I can create them in a matter of minutes with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then save them to a text file or a CSV file. It is awesome. We are able to integrate session management without disrupting business processes. One of the niceties about BeyondTrust is the ability to integrate it with ticketing systems. For example, as per Sarbanes-Oxley, we have to have a reason for why an administrator is performing something. The integration with a ticketing system is ideal rather than manually typing the reason in the reason field through the GUI where most engineers, after a while, end up just typing in Work. They don't put in enough data to make it clearly visible why they connected. The integration with the ticketing system is ideal for that. Ticket-driven access makes the work very quantifiable.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The security on offer seems to be quite good."
"Considering the features provided by the product, I would say that the solution is available at a good price point."
"I would say it's granular controller who can access them."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. It only took a few minutes."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the search for secrets feature that we use to store our passwords and connection strings."
"We use Azure Key Vault to store secrets."
"It allows me to run applications using these certificates without directly installing them."
"Its customer service is excellent."
"I like the session recording feature. I also like the analytics and reports. You can pull up a report, and the UI is fantastic. The system is recording when nobody's there, so we have a record of what's happening."
"The ability to manage privileged account passwords is the most valuable feature."
"Session recording, password rotation, and password vaulting are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is the architecture capabilities, which allow designated server components for high availability and failover. It works well with identity and access management solutions, allowing users to be automatically onboarded and offboarded. The account mapping feature makes rollout seamless. The session monitoring capabilities are excellent, with keystroke and graphical monitoring. This enhanced our security posture by providing detailed accounts of user actions. It helped us pass our SOX audits."
"The flexibility of the licensing model is significantly better as it offers both unlimited users and unlimited devices, unlike Delinea, which is based on the number of users."
"One of the most valuable features is that this is a product designed with enterprises in mind."
"The performance is good."
"Its number one feature is discovery. The discovery engine in BeyondTrust is off the charts. When they perform a discovery, you know everything there is about a server, including what software is installed. For example, if you want to group all of your database servers together, you can do that by using discovery and Smart Rules. If a server has Microsoft SQL installed, it gets put into a group based on a Smart Rule. It makes it very easy to determine what is what in your environment. As organizations grow or acquire other companies and merge, they lose track of what they have. BeyondTrust can help you throw a rope around it very rapidly."
 

Cons

"While it's very reliable in terms of stability, there's always room for improvement."
"I can see that other people are doing the infrastructure as code, they are able to easily manage and cycle their passwords as needed using their own interface they created. It would be nice if Microsoft provided more guidance in that area."
"I would like more code examples."
"I would rate the stability of Microsoft Azure Key Vault an eight out of ten. We use the solution in the data science field. If there is some outage, we did not notice any prolonged outage which would affect our business significantly while working with it."
"The slow response from the support team is one of the shortcomings of the solution that needs to be improved."
"The big problem with Azure Key Vault is key rotation. We haven't found a good way to synchronize the credentials between the databases and Key Vault."
"The solution needs to improve its cost."
"To make it a ten the setup should be more streamlined."
"There is a limited capacity on the appliance, which I wasn't informed about when I purchased the product. I can have a maximum of 150 rules per appliance; any more than that and rule processing becomes very complex, especially regarding password revision. Hitting a capacity limit you don't know about can be problematic. Ideally, we would not have a limited capacity, allowing us to be in a completely managed state with password rotation for every service account, not just the highly privileged ones."
"Adding user behavior analysis to the server or messaging would be beneficial."
"We'd like to have incremental backups to ensure the solution's information is protected regularly."
"Named accounts don't work well in this solution. If you use named accounts for your administrative access, the way Smart Rules work is that it takes your SAM account name and matches it to the account name of your privileged ID, which creates limitations on size and how big those names can be because the directory has a 20-character limit."
"The integration with Secure Remote Access must be improved."
"It has crashed on us in the past."
"We weren't aware that the Password Safe virtual appliance runs on a Windows server. As part of our monthly patching process, we ran into an issue. BeyondTrust Password Safe wasn't compatible with the patching we used to put on our server."
"We face screensaver timeout issues and problems with the server. I would like the product to include a server visibility feature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is inexpensive."
"There are no extra costs beyond the standard fees, beyond maybe data transfer charges. It's $0.025 per 10,000 data transactions, so it is quite cheap."
"It is a cheap option."
"Currently, the tool's monthly licensing costs are around 1,800 USD for all the environments combined, including the production and pre-production environments."
"Azure Key Vault is an affordable solution."
"It is less expensive compared to other competitors."
"The price of the product is okay for my company."
"The price of the solution is reasonable for what we are using it for."
"At the time, BeyondTrust was significantly cheaper than CyberArk. Pricing-wise, if I remember correctly, it goes by assets. The pricing was negotiated for our instances based on the number of assets that we onboard into the system. It is a little different from CyberArk, where the pricing is by users. So, it depends. If you have a lot of assets, it can get very expensive."
"We just pay for Password Safe. Session management is included, but we don't use it. There aren't any additional costs besides the standard licensing fees. We pay for an annual license."
"It has subscription-based licensing. BeyondTrust is three times less expensive than CyberArk."
"When you buy Password Safe and perform your initial Discovery, you have all these servers that are added to your assets in BeyondTrust, but you're not using a license until you actually start managing the systems. BeyondTrust's licensing is based on the systems when they're managed, which means when an administrator is able to connect to the server through BeyondTrust with a managed account. There would be a privileged account on the endpoint when the licensing starts. A significant advantage to that is that there are many organizations that want to evaluate their environment prior to automatic management."
"The pricing of BeyondTrust is very good as compared to other products. That was the main reason we decided to go with BeyondTrust at first."
"The product is quite affordable."
"The pricing structure is better than the competitors. It's much cheaper than CyberArk. They do the licensing on the basis of assets, not on the number of users. For CyberArk, they base the licensing on the number of users, and they have an expensive model of pricing. BeyondTrust has a cheaper model."
"This solution is not cheap—it's a very expensive solution. Very, very expensive compared to the features and functions that they offer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Azure Key Vault or AWS Secrets Manager?
Azure Key Vault is a SaaS solution. You can easily store passwords and secrets securely and encrypt them. Azure Key Vault is a great solution to ensure you are compliant with security and governanc...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Key Vault?
With Azure Key Vault, we can generate our own keys and then import them inside the system, which provides a higher level of security than provider-managed keys.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Key Vault?
Azure Key Vault is a very, very expensive solution. Currently, the solution's pricing is based on the number of transactions, which is very high in some cases.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
The pricing model is more affordable with the option of going for either unlimited devices or users. It is cost-effective compared to other solutions.
What needs improvement with BeyondTrust Password Safe?
As of today, I haven't found any issues. Adding user behavior analysis to the server or messaging would be beneficial. This would help in identifying suspicious activities immediately when users lo...
What is your primary use case for BeyondTrust Password Safe?
Our customers are looking for a product that offers provisioning in their network, and for that reason, they choose BeyondTrust Password Safe.
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure Key Vault, MS Azure Key Vault
BeyondTrust PowerBroker Password Safe
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, DriveTime, Johnson Controls, HP, InterContinental Hotels Group, ASOS
Aera Energy LLC, Care New England, James Madison University
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Key Vault vs. BeyondTrust Password Safe and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.