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IBM Security Verify Access vs Microsoft Entra ID comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 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

Omada Identity
Sponsored
Ranking in Identity Management (IM)
4th
Ranking in Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS)
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (3rd), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (3rd)
IBM Security Verify Access
Ranking in Identity Management (IM)
25th
Ranking in Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS)
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (14th), Access Management (13th)
Microsoft Entra ID
Ranking in Identity Management (IM)
1st
Ranking in Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
233
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (1st), Authentication Systems (1st), Access Management (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Pernilla Hulth - PeerSpot reviewer
The interface is easy to use and gives you a solid overview
The cloud-based deployment was straightforward, but the on-prem deployment was in a highly complex ecosystem. Omada has matured since then. I wouldn't say that it isn't straightforward, but it depends on the customer. A standard deployment is relatively easy, but it can be more painful if you need a lot of customization. We deployed the cloud solution in around four months, nearly meeting the 12-week benchmark. The on-prem deployment took three years. It was a highly complex ecosystem that was dependent on other systems. Depending on the size of your environment, you need a product owner and some specialists for maintenance. My last customer was a university with a complex environment. They had around 12 people involved in maintenance at that organization. Typically, it's between 2-5 people.
AsifIqbal - PeerSpot reviewer
Has good scalability and is stable with no glitches; has a multi-factor authentication feature
What we'd like improved in IBM Security Access Manager is its onboarding process as it's complex, particularly when onboarding new applications. We need to be very, very careful during the onboarding. We have no issues with IBM Security Access Manager because the solution works fine, apart from the onboarding process and IBM's involvement in onboarding issues. If we need support related to the onboarding, we've noticed a pattern where support isn't available, or they don't have much experience, or we're not getting a response from them. We're facing the same issue with IBM Guardium. As we're just focusing on the multi-factor authentication feature of IBM Security Access Manager and we didn't explore any other features, we don't have additional features to suggest for the next release of the solution, but we're in discussion about exploring ID management and access management features, but those are just possibilities because right now, we're focused on exploring our domain.
Aaron Liang - PeerSpot reviewer
Has significantly improved secure access to applications and resources in our environment
Microsoft Entra ID has helped by simplifying our management of permissions for APIs. We are not directly exposing credentials, as we use tokens instead. It has made management easier and more secure, especially in a multi-user environment. The implementation of Microsoft Entra ID significantly improved secure access to applications and resources in our environment, primarily through the widespread use of single-sign-on. Managing API permissions became much easier, as application registration often involves calling an API to utilize services without directly exposing credentials, relying instead on token-based authentication. This streamlined approach benefits end-users by simplifying access while remaining transparent to them. Ultimately, my role focuses on ensuring a smooth and user-friendly experience, even if the underlying technology remains unseen by the end-users. Our company strongly emphasizes passwordless authentication, primarily through device-bound passkeys in Microsoft Authenticator. While administrators with high-privileged accounts utilize YubiKeys and passwords for tasks like accessing Microsoft Graph, we are actively transitioning all other users towards passwordless methods such as Windows Hello biometrics. This approach streamlines authentication and enhances security. Though initial deployment in 2022 presented challenges due to hardware limitations and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the technology has significantly improved and provides a simple and effective user experience.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our customers have benefited from Omada Identity automating the certification process. Most of our customers were using manual methods for user access certification. With Omada Identity, you can automate almost all of it, which means that certification now becomes on demand. You don't have to wait for two or three months to execute a certification timeframe. Instead, you can do certifications as often as you want."
"It has a very user-friendly interface compared to what we are used to, and it is highly configurable. In the old solution, when we needed to do something, we had to have a programmer sitting next to us, whereas, in Omada Identity, everything is configurable."
"You can make resources. You can import them from Azure or Active Directory and put them in an application. For example, if there is an application that uses a lot of Active Directory groups, you can make the groups available for people. If they need to access that application, you can tell them the resource groups you have for that application. People can do everything by themselves. They do not need anybody else. They can just go to the Omada portal, and they can do it all by themselves. That is terrific."
"User-friendly solution."
"It has a lot of out-of-the-box features. It is flexible, and there are a lot of possibilities to configure and extend it. It is user-friendly. It has an interface that is end-user or business-user friendly."
"What I like most is that we can always find a solution, and we can also find the cause when something goes wrong. I like that the most because everything is in one way or another traceable. That is what I like most. I like its reliability."
"The customer success and support teams have been crucial."
"We don't have to go in and do a lot of the work that we did before. It may have saved us somewhere in the range of 10 to 30 percent of the time we spent on provisioning access."
"The tool provides a password vault, single sign-on, and multifactor authentication. It offers various authentication methods like fingerprint integration, one-time passwords, or tokens sent via email or SMS. This ensures secure access to your accounts by providing multiple authentication options."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Security Access Manager, at least for my company, is multi-factor authentication. That's the only feature my company is using. The solution works well and has no glitches. IBM Security Access Manager is a very good solution, so my company is still using it."
"It's a good solution for identification and access management."
"Its stability and UI are most valuable."
"From the integration point of view, it supports SAML, OIDC, and OAuth. For legacy applications that don't have support for SAML and other new protocols, it provides single sign-on access to end-users. From the integration compatibility point of view, it is highly capable."
"I have found this solution to be really practical and when a user wants to log in, it is effortless and runs smooth."
"The solution has powerful authentification and authorization. It offers a good way to increase security."
"It enhanced our end user experience quite a bit. Instead of the days of having to contact the service desk with challenges for choosing their password, users can go in and do it themselves locally, regardless of where they are in the world. This has certainly made it a better experience accessing their applications. Previously, a lot of times, they had to remember multiple usernames and passwords for different systems. This solution brings it all together, using a single sign-on experience."
"It can be used to grant access at a granular level. It provides secure access and many ways to offer security to your user resources. It provides a good level of security for any access on Azure. It gives you options like multi-factor authentication where apart from your password, you can use other factors for authentication, such as a code is sent to your phone or the authenticator app that you can use login."
"The solution adds an extra layer of security."
"Having worked as an IT consultant mainly with the Microsoft stack across various industries, I have experience with different identity management solutions. Microsoft Entra ID remains the best option."
"Two very important features in terms of security are governance and compliance through the Conditional Access policies and Azure Log Analytics."
"The security and compliance features are very helpful. The online information on the site is well documented."
"https://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/microsoft-bi-review-52460-by-amanda-zhou"
"The most valuable feature is Conditional Access, and we use it extensively."
 

Cons

"The solution should be made more agile for customers to own or configure."
"The account management integration isn't bad, but it isn't plug-and-play like Microsoft Azure. You need some deep development knowledge to set up the connectors."
"Omada Identity's user interface needs improvement, especially for new users."
"Its flexibility is both a good thing and a bad thing. Because it is very flexible, it also becomes too complex. This is common for most of the products we evaluated. Its scalability should be better. It had a few scalability issues."
"We are still on Omada on-prem, but I understand that when Omada is in the cloud, you cannot send an attachment via email. We have some emails with attachments for new employees because we have to explain to them how to register and do their multi-factor authentication. All that information is in the attachment. People have to do that before they are in our system. We cannot give them a link to our Intranet and SharePoint because they do not yet have access. They have to register before that, so I need to send the attachments, but this functionality is not there in the cloud."
"The reporting on the warehouse data and the import process both have room for improvement."
"The biggest issue, which is the reason why we are transitioning from their product to SailPoint, is the overall user experience. From a technical perspective, it is a very good product, but from an end-user experience perspective, it significantly lacks."
"The user interface could be improved. The interface between Omada and the user is mainly text-based."
"What we'd like improved in IBM Security Access Manager is its onboarding process as it's complex, particularly when onboarding new applications. We need to be very, very careful during the onboarding. We have no issues with IBM Security Access Manager because the solution works fine, apart from the onboarding process and IBM's involvement in onboarding issues. If we need support related to the onboarding, we've noticed a pattern where support isn't available, or they don't have much experience, or we're not getting a response from them. We're facing the same issue with IBM Guardium. As we're just focusing on the multi-factor authentication feature of IBM Security Access Manager and we didn't explore any other features, we don't have additional features to suggest for the next release of the solution, but we're in discussion about exploring ID management and access management features, but those are just possibilities because right now, we're focused on exploring our domain."
"The user interface needs to be simplified, it's complex and not user-friendly."
"They can improve the single sign-on configuration for OIDC and OAuth. That is not very mature in this product, and they can improve it in this particular area. OIDC is a third-party integration that we do with the cloud platforms, and OAuth is an authorization mechanism for allowing a user having an account with Google or any other provider to access an application. Organizations these days are looking for just-in-time provisioning use cases, but IBM Security Access Manager is not very mature for such use cases. There are only a few applications that can be integrated, and this is where this product is lagging. However, in terms of configuration and single sign-on mechanisms, it is a great product."
"There are a lot of areas that can be improved, but the main area is the lack of customization. You cannot easily customize anything in the product. It is not easy to tweak the functionality. It is challenging to change the out-of-the-box functionality."
"The solution could be classified as a hilt system. There are a lot of resources being used and it is suitable for very large enterprises or the public sector."
"The user interface for users and administrators could be improved to make it easier. Automating some functions could also be beneficial."
"Configuration could be simplified for the end-user."
"I think the solution can improve by making the consumption of that data easier for our customers."
"I would like it if Intune could manage MacOS or iOS directly. Right now, we have to use a third-party solution."
"I would like to see Microsoft communicate how they intend to manage legacy applications. Right now, you still have to deploy a hosted domain server (which comes at an extra cost) if you have a legacy application that cannot sync properly with the enterprise applications and the modern applications."
"Whatever business requirements we needed in the past three years, users were created, with the name of the user and they were not connected with the Active Directory. We were trying to in house in three years and with directory, but we were not able to achieve it."
"Compared to what we can do on-prem, Azure AD lacks a feature for multiple hierarchical groups. For example, Group A is part of group B. Group B is part of group C. Then, if I put someone into group A, which is part of already B, they get access to any system that group B has access to, and that provisioning is automatically there."
"Be aware that it may not work perfectly globally yet. There are still glitches with the solution in Africa."
"I would like to see improvements made when it comes to viewing audit logs, sign-in logs, and resource tags."
"I want better integration between Azure AD and the on-prem environment because there are currently limitations that can hamper employee experience. We use a feature called password writeback, that can be challenging to implement in a hybrid environment. Employees can change their passwords using a self-service password reset (SSPR) feature, which reflects from the cloud to the on-prem identity, but not the other way around. Currently, there is no way to reflect passwords from on-prem identities to the cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Omada Identity offers a reasonable price point, but it will increase as we transition to the cloud."
"The initial total cost of ownership to implement Omada Identity is not small. The TCO for the implementation is as high as any other solution. However, the cost of maintaining the solution is at par or lower than competitors, including adding more features or maintaining the system after the initial deployment or installation to make sure that they are available for users to use or extending the functionalities of those activities. Those maintenance costs are lower than other vendors, but the initial cost of getting the system installed is still high."
"There were a lot of administrator, partner, and supplier accounts for people who were no longer working for us but still in the system. So, we reduced the number of users no longer with the company, which saved us some money on licensing."
"They are positioned at a good price point. They are lower than some of their competitors."
"The pricing is too high for SMBs."
"It is licensed per managed user per year."
"Omada Identity is very reasonably and competitively priced."
"It is not cheap. None of these solutions are cheap, but we have good pricing at least for now from a licensing perspective."
"The license and costs depend on the amount range of users you have. For just approximately 2,000 users, the price is practical and fair. However, when you have 20,000 users, it starts to become really expensive, and the discount per user is not attractive enough to go ahead and purchase."
"It costs about 300K AED for a year. Its pricing is a bit on the higher end, but in comparison to other products in the market, its price is still better. There are lots of other products that are very costly."
"The product is not expensive. It depends on the number of users."
"For a small business buying individual licenses, it is an affordable solution."
"We pay a yearly license. Licenses are very expensive."
"Pricing could always be better. You pay the premium for Microsoft. Sometimes, it is worth it, and at other times, you wish to have more licensing options, especially for smaller companies."
"The price of Azure Active Directory and Amazon AWS, are almost the same, but most people prefer Amazon AWS because they find it's a little cheaper to some extent and an easier platform to use."
"Entra's pricing is somewhat higher compared to AWS."
"If you are dealing with one supplier with an out-of-the-box solution, which provides you end-to-end capabilities, then it is naturally cheaper and less of a headache to manage and operate."
"For you to make use of some of the security features, you need to upgrade your licenses. If it is possible, could they just make some features free? For instance, for the Condition Access policy, you need to set that up and be on Azure AD P2 licensing. So if they could make it free or reduce the licensing for small businesses, that would be cool, as I believe security is for everyone."
"We are a non-profit organization, so we get good prices from Microsoft for their products. It is working well, but it could be cheaper. For the type of organization we are, it would be good if they could give a little bit more and be more generous like Google, which has completely free services. Microsoft has free versions or web services called Office 365 E1, which is free for use, but we want to have it with more qualified clients."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Insurance Company
16%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Educational Organization
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Omada Identity Cloud?
As an administrator, we benefit from a lot of functionality that is available out of the box, but it is also configur...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Omada Identity Cloud?
They are positioned at a good price point. They are lower than some of their competitors.
What needs improvement with Omada Identity Cloud?
The biggest issue, which is the reason why we are transitioning from their product to SailPoint, is the overall user ...
What do you like most about IBM Security Access Manager?
The tool provides a password vault, single sign-on, and multifactor authentication. It offers various authentication ...
What needs improvement with IBM Security Access Manager?
The user interface for users and administrators could be improved to make it easier. Automating some functions could ...
How does Duo Security compare with Microsoft Authenticator?
We switched to Duo Security for identity verification. We’d been using a competitor but got the chance to evaluate Du...
What do you like most about Azure Active Directory?
It is very simple. The Active Directory functions are very easy for us. Its integration with anything is very easy. W...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Active Directory?
Regarding pricing, for the services we receive, it seems within the market range and about average.
 

Also Known As

Omada Identity Suite, Omada Identity Cloud
IBM Security Verify Access (SVA), IBM Security Access Manager, ISAM
Azure AD, Azure Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Authenticator
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bayer, ECCO Shoes, Vattenfall, NuStar Energy, Unicredit, Schiphol Group, BMW Group, Deutsche Leasing
POST Luxembourg
Microsoft Entre ID is trusted by companies of all sizes and industries including Walmart, Zscaler, Uniper, Amtrak, monday.com, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Security Verify Access vs. Microsoft Entra ID and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.