No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

CyberArk Privileged Access Manager vs StrongDM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 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

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 (3rd), Mainframe Security (1st), Operational Technology (OT) Security (3rd)
StrongDM
Ranking in Privileged Access Management (PAM)
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Access Management (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Privileged Access Management (PAM) category, the mindshare of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is 10.4%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StrongDM is 2.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CyberArk Privileged Access Manager10.4%
StrongDM2.5%
Other87.1%
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.
MX
Dev Ops Engineer And Solution Architect at Scania
Centralized access has improved privileged control and now provides strong audit visibility
I believe StrongDM can improve its initial setup and onboarding experience for larger enterprise environments like Scania, where we have a lot of processes. Integrating different teams, access policies, and existing identity workflows requires substantial planning. Additionally, I think the dashboard customization and reporting could be more flexible for operational teams, though new teams find it manageable. Once the platform is fully integrated, it provides significant value. Apart from the onboarding experience, I would also mention that the templates for enterprise onboarding and policy setup could benefit from innovative thinking tailored to organizations managing large AWS and Kubernetes workloads. Enhanced customization in dashboards and reporting would further ease operations and provide better insights.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution is quite efficient."
"It takes people out of the machine work of ensuring credentials remain up-to-date, and handles connection brokering such that human usage and credential management remain independent."
"The session recording and monitoring capabilities are valuable. We have real-time session management ability to record, audit, and monitor any privileged user activities. That is a big deal."
"Technical support is excellent; one of the most knowledgeable and well-trained support staff."
"CyberArk's GUI is user friendly."
"It has improved our organization by being able to consolidate several privileged access technologies into a unified tool, while session recording, auditing capability, and approval workflows allow a high degree of control over the organisation’s privileged access requirements for compliance purposes."
"It is useful for protecting passwords. If you need to do access security management, you can first use the CyberArk console, and after that, you can connect the firewall interface or firewall command line. Similarly, if you need to do an RDP session, you need to first log in to CyberArk before connecting to the Windows RDP session. This way, the admin doesn't know the password, and that password is changed immediately. To change the password, you first discover the old password in the network, and after that, you can change the password."
"With reducing the privileged account access, there has been a huge improvement."
"The best features in StrongDM are that it is the easiest product in the market for this situation with easy access."
"StrongDM positively impacts our organization in many ways, mainly in cost savings from the time saved, and it has significantly improved both security and operational efficiency for us."
"The best features in StrongDM are the password rotation capabilities, which I think are pretty cool, and also how you can literally log in to any of the privileged servers through a single platform."
"All of the logging is handled for us, including for auditing purposes. Looking through the audit logs is not a painful experience."
"I absolutely would say that the best features of StrongDM and what I appreciate about the solution is that time to onboard is absolutely minimal."
"StrongDM replaced the puzzle of different solutions with one single product, which made managing resources more efficient."
"We primarily used StrongDM for access to resources on private networks like EC2 machines, Kubernetes clusters, and various databases."
 

Cons

"It should be easy to use for non-technical people. Its interface can be a bit difficult. Some parts of its interface are not very intuitive. Some of the controls are hidden, and instead of having a screen with all the controls for that account on it, you have to use menus and other similar things."
"With PAS, they escalate our problems in due time, not so much with EPM."
"Updates have been somewhat difficult, resulting in challenges when moving from one version to another. The current version includes automatic updates."
"New functionalities or discovered bugs take a little longer to patch. We would greatly appreciate quicker development of security patches and bug corrections."
"The solution could improve by adding more connectors."
"Maintaining the product is challenging. Upgrades require a lot of resources, as it impacts the entire organization. For example, upgrading components like the Privileged Session Manager (PSM) and the vault is time-consuming and difficult. In the long term, I would like to see these processes simplified, especially for on-premise installations."
"I would like easier integrations for creating an online dashboard that executives would look at or are able to run reports from the tool."
"The web interface has come a long way, but the PrivateArk client seems clunky and not intuitive. It could use an update to be brought up to speed with the usability of PVWA."
"My thoughts on the pricing of StrongDM is that it is expensive."
"It would be beneficial to have better control and alignment between frequent updates and improved communication regarding possible negative effects on existing customer bases."
"We've had a few issues with the stability of this product in the past."
"I rate the stability of the product five out of ten because crashes sometimes happen when we are working on it."
"I think the stability of StrongDM is about four to five due to the occasional crashes that I mentioned."
"It would be beneficial to have better control and alignment between frequent updates and improved communication regarding possible negative effects on existing customer bases."
"I believe StrongDM can improve its initial setup and onboarding experience for larger enterprise environments like Scania, where we have a lot of processes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is slightly higher compared to other solutions, but it is reasonable because there are better security features."
"The SaaS version of CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault is very expensive, but the on-premises version is relative, e.g. depending on the size of the environment, it can be a bit pricey, but it's relatively okay compared to the others."
"It's an affordable platform."
"CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is on the expensive side. It is very expensive."
"Although CyberArk Privileged Access Management is expensive, its protection capabilities outweigh the cost."
"I believe that this solution is priced well. It's the market leader and I think that it's the best solution."
"It's per-company, license-based."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"The licensing is per user per month."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions are best for your needs.
896,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise174
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

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 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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StrongDM?
My thoughts on the pricing of StrongDM is that it is expensive. Coming from knowing the landscape of the market, it is not that they are not competitive. They are still very expensive. That does no...
What needs improvement with StrongDM?
In StrongDM, I think the installation was hard, and they want to be more flexible in the initial setup. I think they want to add more features like traditional PAM. It is difficult to find document...
What is your primary use case for StrongDM?
My use case involves a company I'm working in that wants to secure the connectivity between the DevOps team and the backend server in the company.
 

Also Known As

CyberArk Privileged Access Security, CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rockwell Automation
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager vs. StrongDM and other solutions. Updated: May 2026.
896,510 professionals have used our research since 2012.