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

 

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

CyberArk Privileged Access ...
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 (2nd), Mainframe Security (1st), Operational Technology (OT) Security (3rd)
Fortra's Powertech Identity...
Ranking in Privileged Access Management (PAM)
37th
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Privileged Access Management (PAM) category, the mindshare of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is 11.4%, down from 19.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager is 1.0%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CyberArk Privileged Access Manager11.4%
Fortra's Powertech Identity & Access Manager1.0%
Other87.6%
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our most valuable features would probably be key rotation, the SKM or SSH key manager, and account discovery."
"Because we now have the ability to grant access to management utilities like DNS Manager, Sequel Studio, and MMC, in a secure fashion, without system admins being required to continually reenter various passwords that are stored who knows where, it has really made the system admin's job much easier. It has made the PSM's job much easier. It has made the auditor's job and the security team's job and the access manager's job significantly easier, because we're able to move much more quickly toward a role-based access management system, and that is really streamlining the whole onboarding/offboarding management process."
"We also use CyberArk’s Secrets Manager. Because AWS is the biggest area for us, we have accounts in AWS that are being rotated by CyberArk. We also have a manual process for the most sensitive of our AWS accounts, like root accounts. We've used Secrets Manager on those and that has resulted in a significant risk reduction, as well."
"I appreciate CyberArk's real-time capabilities. I can secure critical sessions, such as SSH or database sessions. As a security professional, I have real-time visibility into ongoing sessions. If anything suspicious occurs, I can terminate or freeze the session, which is part of user behavior analytics."
"We are able to know who is accessing what and when; having accountability."
"Provides improved security around having your credentials locked down and rotated regularly."
"The combination of CPM and PSM resolves a lot of use cases."
"You can gradually implement CyberArk, starting with more easily attainable goals."
"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."
 

Cons

"Improved user-friendliness, granularity, and functionality would enhance the product further."
"Stability is a huge concern right now. We are on a version which is very unstable. We have to upgrade to stabilize it. It is fine, but the problem is we have to hire CyberArk to do the upgrade. This costs money, and it is their bug."
"CyberArk PAM could greatly benefit from an under-the-hood update; integrating machine learning algorithms could provide predictive insights."
"The solution that they proposed was not straightforward because of the backend processes of CyberArk."
"The price is high compared to Azure Key Vault. It's the most expensive solution."
"CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault can improve the distributive vault feature. Distributing the vault in multiple areas and multiple data centers should improve."
"CyberArk Privileged Access Manager can be improved because I have experienced one issue where a user connected through RDP to a Linux server and the PAM could not fetch any commands or key store logging from the Linux server, which works fine on Windows servers."
"The issue of technical support is crucial, as there are not many specialized partners available in Brazil to provide this service. While English language support is of good quality, there is a significant shortage of partners capable of meeting the demand locally."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the tool’s pricing a six out of ten."
"This product is very expensive."
"Network and security licenses are currently being managed by other outsource vendors, so they are facing some type of problems in the digital aspect."
"I believe that this solution is priced well. It's the market leader and I think that it's the best solution."
"It's not a cheap application. It's very expensive."
"It costs us around $200 per user."
"With reducing the privileged account access, there has been a huge improvement. They are now bringing more accounts on a little at a time."
"The price of this solution is quite reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise174
No data available
 

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 do you like most about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
The most valuable features of the solution are control and analytics.
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...
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Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rockwell Automation
Integris Health
Find out what your peers are saying about CyberArk, One Identity, Okta and others in Privileged Access Management (PAM). Updated: March 2026.
884,732 professionals have used our research since 2012.