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Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager vs Idira Privileged Access Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 2, 2026

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...
Ranking in Privileged Access Management (PAM)
33rd
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Idira Privileged Access Man...
Ranking in Privileged Access Management (PAM)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
230
Ranking in other categories
User Activity Monitoring (1st), Enterprise Password Managers (3rd), Mainframe Security (1st), Operational Technology (OT) Security (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Privileged Access Management (PAM) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Idira Privileged Access Manager is 9.8%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CyberArk Privileged Access Manager9.8%
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager1.0%
Other89.2%
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
 

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.
Atul-Gujar - PeerSpot reviewer
CyberArk manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Secures critical infrastructures with essential user session audit records
A potential area for improvement is enhancing support for cluster environments and distributed Vaults. Clients in multiple countries that need central access have different challenges that require better solutions from CyberArk. For financial services, CyberArk can improve incident response by ensuring fast support for critical priority tickets to meet compliance requirements. Providing more documentation on CyberArk is recommended for new team members to enhance their troubleshooting capabilities. I understand it's up to the client, but 99% fail to change the demo key, so it's crucial for CyberArk to emphasize changing the key and documenting it as part of the installation process.

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."
"HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility."
"It is a robust product."
"Rather than multiple tools for maintaining regulatory compliance around passwords and privileged accounts, we have centralized as much as possible with CyberArk. This is now a one stop shop for end users to access their elevated credentials."
"The most valuable feature is that it always provides flexibility, password quality and one-time user check-in and check-out."
"It gives us the capability to rotate passwords, which is the biggest thing because we do not want them being stagnant so every service account that we have needs to be rotated at least once a year."
"Due to meaningless error messages, it is not possible to repair non-trivial errors without support, however, with support, we solved every problem."
"Session monitoring includes recordings of all activities performed."
"It has helped from an auditing perspective identify who has access to privileged accounts."
"I primarily use the solution to record any actions taken on specific important targets, allowing management to look at actions and play them back to see what was done within the environment."
 

Cons

"I would not necessarily recommend customers use it."
"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."
"As they grow, the technical support is having growing pains. One of the things is just being able to get somebody on the phone sometimes."
"One thing that could be improved is to create of a better alternative for fixing group policy fees. We currently use Microsoft, but they have introduced new policies that may not be compatible."
"The reporting should be improved. There should be more customization."
"Making the reports more editable would be beneficial."
"They should allow further customization as it's really hard to do any further customizations over CyberArk."
"Technical support from the vendor is the worst and that is one reason I stopped using CyberArk."
"One limitation is that we are not able to put this into a decentralized mode."
"CyberArk PAM is a very broad product as everyone's requirements for implementation are different. In our particular case, the initial implementation was planned and developed by people who didn't know our specific network requirements, so the initial implementation needed to be tweaked over time. While this is normal, at the time all these "major" changes required CyberArk professional services to come in-plant and "assist" with the changes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is not a cheap solution. It is expensive as compared with other solutions. However, it is one of the best solutions in their domain."
"CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is on the expensive side. It is very expensive."
"The solution is available at a high price"
"The product’s pricing is feasible for enterprise customers. The pricing is expensive for smaller businesses. You need to pay additional costs for service implementation and local support."
"The price of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is expensive. There are no other fees other than the standard licensing fees."
"Its price can be reduced."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
"The price of CyberArk support could be a little bit less. Otherwise, pricing is fine."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise175
 

Questions from the Community

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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?
My thoughts on the pricing of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager depend entirely on the vendors' requirements. If they want their things to be secure, they have to spend accordingly. We have four t...
What needs improvement with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
I believe account discovery and rolling support need to be improved. Account discovery is important when integrating with other systems, as other PAM solutions can perform account discovery and onb...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Powertech Identity & Access Manager, Powertech Identity & Access Manager, BoKS, BoKS ServerControl, Fox Technologies ApplicationControl, ApplicationControl
CyberArk Privileged Access Security, CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Integris Health
Rockwell Automation
Find out what your peers are saying about CyberArk, One Identity, Okta and others in Privileged Access Management (PAM). Updated: May 2026.
899,258 professionals have used our research since 2012.