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Okta Platform vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2025

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

Okta Platform
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
2nd
Ranking in Access Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Authentication Systems (4th), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (3rd), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (4th), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (1st), AI IT Support (2nd)
Symantec Siteminder
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
13th
Ranking in Access Management
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Web Access Management (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Single Sign-On (SSO) category, the mindshare of Okta Platform is 9.7%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Siteminder is 2.6%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Single Sign-On (SSO) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Okta Platform9.7%
Symantec Siteminder2.6%
Other87.7%
Single Sign-On (SSO)
 

Featured Reviews

SS
Specialist Solutions at a university with 10,001+ employees
Automated lifecycle management has cut onboarding times and now drives secure, clean access
Although I am a fan of Okta Platform overall, there are areas where it could improve security outcomes and reduce admin friction. My top improvement areas include the system log and analytics upgrade, which are great for point troubleshooting, but trending and root cause analysis across large tenants still require exporting to SIEM. Verbose queries and long-range retention costs can add up. Additionally, while certificate rotations are better than most, the process is still manual for busy portfolios, especially concerning multi-SP SAML certificate rotations and app metadata drift. Two more buckets of potential improvements for Okta Platform involve user experience and security. There is the issue of push fatigue and prompt sprawl, where users receive multiple prompts across different apps and sessions. I arrived at the rating of eight because the core controls are strong and reliable, but a few operational UX and UI gaps prevent it from being rated higher. The reasons for not giving it a nine or ten include ongoing issues concerning safety and change safety, the complexity of group rules and mappings, and the lack of robustness in policy management. Additionally, there remains a need for more manual involvement than necessary, especially for large portfolios and dual certificate rotation, along with proactive SP data metadata validation.
Muzi Lubisi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior technical Consultant at CA Africa
Improved user experience with seamless integration and easy installation
The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows. Additionally, it is very beneficial for deploying single sign-on sessions between different windows on a web browser, provided I am connected to the right identity provider. That seamless integration significantly improves user experience and efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They have good push authentications."
"The most valuable feature of this solution for most customers is access management."
"As an integrator, I find Okta Platform user-friendly with a good number of connectors, making it easy to integrate with applications, and it is easy for SSO implementation and MFA implementation."
"One of the features that I have found to be very valuable is its interoperability and compatibility with all types of resources, whether it's networking, infrastructure, or applications. That is, it is compatible as well as interoperable, as far as the federated authentication is concerned."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"Valuable features include UD, SSO functionality, MFA and Adaptive MFA functionality, ability to link multiple Directory databases with UD."
"It's reliable and it does what it is advertised to do."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are the integration with external websites one-factor authentication."
"The solution has features that allow you to easily distinguish between protected and unprotected resources."
"It has the ability to authenticate and authorize users. It is the main feature for our security."
"Authentication & Authorization are important because all the sites need authentication for security purposes. That has been handled pretty well all these years with SSO."
"I liked the debugging part. There are only two files (trace file and log file) that you need to look into while performing debugging, and the logs give you the exact info on where and what needs to be fixed."
"SAML is the best thing we're using right now because there is no need for creating an external account."
"Federation is valuable, for sure, because we have a lot of third-party vendors that we need to integrate with, and this is a turnkey solution in some ways."
"Symantec Siteminder Is both scalable and stable."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with the Active Directory."
 

Cons

"It would be pricing, which is a tough one because it goes against Microsoft. A lot of companies say they're a Microsoft partner, and they get all their software for free. Okta is like a luxury product, and it's not the most affordable one. I would say if they could work on pricing, it would help. Other than that, they've done great strides in developing a product that is really good. The companies that do see the value tend to invest in it."
"We had some implementation issues."
"Okta has a limitation with directory integrations. If you have multiple Active Directory integrations, the user distinguished name (DN) and the manager DN don't get imported properly into the Okta user profile."
"Therefore, if you have 10 million users, that's almost 100 million, so it is costly."
"In the future, we'd like to see the product implement more security features, like, for example, zero-trust."
"Users sometimes have difficulty getting verification codes."
"In some setup cases, there are issues with attributes not going in properly."
"Okta Platform can be improved by enhancing the mobile application because sometimes it has issues."
"The initial setup was complex, painful. But that is to be expected of any new setup. When you're a big bank like us, any kind of migration to a new product is hard. I expect it to be painful, and it was painful. But it's not something that you can avoid."
"To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly."
"The support team could work on their response time and overall competence."
"CA has reporting at the moment. With the reporting, every particular segmented product has a reporting engine. I would like to see centralized reporting for all of them together."
"The main thing is we do not have the traceability and good monitoring that CA can provide us to capture problems when they occur."
"All the problems that we reported actually have never been resolved. We could not capture enough information for CA to be able to debug the problem."
"The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live."
"I'd like to see a rework of the user directory configuration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has a yearly subscription. As compared to its competitors, it is quite expensive. It also has a complex licensing model."
"Okta Customer Identity is not an expensive solution."
"The solution is not the cheapest but not the most expensive. They are in the middle rating."
"The price of Okta Workforce Identity is competitively priced. We pay annually for the use of the solution."
"The licensing is per user per month and includes full technical support."
"Price-wise, Okta Workforce Identity is a cheap solution. The overall cost depends on the license since you can negotiate with Okta or any of Okta's partners only if you opt for many licenses."
"The cost per user for this solution is really high and could be reduced."
"The solution's pricing model could be better for SMBs."
"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
"The solution's pricing is competitive."
"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
"Siteminder is a little costly. You pay for licensing, and they offer packages, so if you have less users, then you have to buy different products at different prices. If you have more of a user base, then the package is different. They also include other features—for example, if you have a database and you're using Siteminder, then it's good to use a Semantic-specific database, but if you are using less, then you have to purchase the database separately. Whereas if you are going for a bigger license, then it comes within the package. It depends on which plan you are using."
"The licensing is fair for this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Insurance Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise48
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise69
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Okta Workforce Identity?
Okta has introduced the Universal Directory. It has custom attribute capability and user permissions to read/write on their profiles or hide them. Profile sources and identity profile sourcing are ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Okta Workforce Identity?
Pricing for Okta is reasonably not that much, however, I don't have access to the commercial aspect.
What needs improvement with Okta Workforce Identity?
Currently, in Okta Workforce Identity we get the two-digit authentication code. Instead of getting the two-digit authentication code, if we had an option to do fingerprint verification, that would ...
What do you like most about Symantec Siteminder?
It's agent-based. It's convenient to deploy and integrate.
What needs improvement with Symantec Siteminder?
Symantec Siteminder needs to have adaptive authentication and multi-factor authentication as integrated features. Currently, multi-factor authentication is available as a separate solution, and it ...
 

Also Known As

Okta Customer Identity, Workforce Identity
SiteMinder, CA SSO, Layer7 SiteMinder
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FedEx, Zoom, Takeda, Lululemon Athletica, GrunHub, jetBlue, McKensson, Bain & Company, Engie, Peloton, Sonos, T-Mobile, Hewlett Packard, MGM Resorts, Ally Financial, Priceline, Albertsons, Itercom, Classy, FICO, Kensho, Live Nation, Drata, Rotary, and others.
British Telecom, CoreBlox, DBS, HMS, Itera ASA and Simeo
Find out what your peers are saying about Okta Platform vs. Symantec Siteminder and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
883,712 professionals have used our research since 2012.