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One Identity Active Roles vs Quest Change Auditor for Active Directory 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

One Identity Active Roles
Ranking in Active Directory Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (5th), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (5th)
Quest Change Auditor for Ac...
Ranking in Active Directory Management
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Active Directory Management category, the mindshare of One Identity Active Roles is 5.4%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Change Auditor for Active Directory is 6.7%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Active Directory Management
 

Featured Reviews

Neera Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Requires minimal training and provides granular control
The granular control has been very helpful for us. We want to be able to control what level users have access to. It is possible to control access levels at the organizational unit or even the attribute level, making it helpful for us. Active Roles helped increase operational efficiency in our organization. We have delegated user provisioning to the help desk so they can create users or manage accounts. We have delegated group management to identified group owners who can manage their groups. Some of them just need read-only access to AD; they do not need to download the native tools. They can just do it via a browser. Active Roles has helped our organization reduce the number of erroneous privileged accounts. We have set the templates, and we have set the standards. It helps standardize all the naming conventions and how they are provisioned with the rules. That is definitely very helpful. We use the change history to see who might have modified what object. We have that tracking, but we use a tool from Quest called Change Auditor that can do the auditing to figure out who did what type of thing for auditing.
RémyMAURAS - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time notifications and protection for Active Directory accounts with good documentation
The primary use case is to manage human errors, like protecting identities from being modified by the software, and to audit security. This includes monitoring high-privilege accounts and having the ability to back up previous values if unauthorized modifications occur in the Active Directory…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best part of this Active Roles is the workflow engine. It features an industry-leading workflow automation feature. It's a visual PowerShell that allows task interruption."
"Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome."
"Another good feature is the change history. It's centralized in a single place and allows us to manage people's Active Directory domains from a central location. We can also drill down into individual objects in a troubleshooting or even an auditing situation. We can show evidence to auditors by drilling down into the individual history. It gives you all the history of what happened around an individual object. That is something that would be almost impossible to do in Active Directory, or extremely complicated."
"In comparison to native Active Directory tools, using Active Roles for delegation is so much better. It uses an access template and that makes it easy to see who can access what. In fact, you can do that for many objects as well."
"With the use of the sync service we were able to import information from multiple external systems and populate them within our space and leverage them for downstream systems."
"Instead of deleting accounts, we like the deprovision option so that we can reverse any accidental deletions. It also gives a higher level of quality control in terms of enforcing any number of variables, such as making sure that an account has a description entered before the account can be created. We can backtrack and know the history of it that way."
"It has helped increase operational efficiency in our organization."
"Active Roles improved the management of users, groups, and AD objects in the organization."
"The most valuable features are the ability to protect Active Directory accounts and groups, and the real-time notifications that help manage Active Directory more effectively."
 

Cons

"There are areas for improvement in One Identity Active Roles that include updating the web interface, creating an API accessible from the web, and improving overall performance, as it can be slow at times."
"For ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript."
"There are some features that we think should be included in their next release. We think these things would take them to the next level: the ability to completely force or limit any dynamic group processing to specific servers, change-tracking reporting of virtual attributes, and the ability to use files as inputs to automation workloads. These things have also been talked about. Knowing them, they're probably working on them."
"It also has workflows and those are really powerful, but there are no built-in workflows. When it comes to them, it's empty. I would personally love for it to come with ten, 15, or 20 workflows where each achieves a certain task... I could just look at how each is done, clone them, copy them, modify them the way I want them, and be good to go. Right now we have to invent things from scratch."
"The way you can search groups could be better."
"The initial setup was quite easy, but it was time-consuming. It took about three months."
"The user and group management in Azure AD could be better. Our focus these days is dynamic sharing with several on-prem Microsoft applications like SharePoint."
"When doing a workflow, we would like a bit better feedback on the screen, as we're trying to get it to work. For example, there is a "Find" function that you need set up in a workflow to do some of the automation. It is not the easiest to get a result from those finds when you're trying to do that. In the MMC, they have a couple different types of workflows. In this particular case, we use their workflow functionality to find all of X within the environment, then if you find it, do X, Y, and Z. You can have multiple steps. When you do that search function within that workflow, it's really hard to find out, "Is my search working?" It would be nice if there was some feedback on the screen so you could see if your search is working properly within the workflow."
"Areas that could be improved include having more management capabilities with command-line scripts and more flexibility in general."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is on the higher end."
"The pricing is high. I have not been involved with the renewal or cost aspect, but I know it is not cheap by any means. However, it is very useful for our environment."
"The price is reasonable. It costs us about 1 million Danish kroner annually, and we also spend about half as much on consultants."
"It's fairly priced."
"The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"It's expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for One Identity Active Roles?
The pricing is high. I have not been involved with the renewal or cost aspect, but I know it is not cheap by any means. However, it is very useful for our environment.
What needs improvement with One Identity Active Roles?
There is always room to improve the user interface for increased clarity. I believe enhancements to the console are also necessary because it is more confusing than the web interface.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Change Auditor for Active Directory?
The price can vary based on the components purchased and the needs and budget of the organization. It is considered a bit pricey, especially for smaller companies.
What needs improvement with Quest Change Auditor for Active Directory?
Areas that could be improved include having more management capabilities with command-line scripts and more flexibility in general. Often this type of tool could benefit from better scripting capab...
What is your primary use case for Quest Change Auditor for Active Directory?
The primary use case is to manage human errors, like protecting identities from being modified by the software, and to audit security. This includes monitoring high-privilege accounts and having th...
 

Also Known As

Quest Active Roles
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
American Airlines, Bank of America, BARCLAYS, ebay, Ford, intel, MARS, MERCK, Microsoft, UBER, VISA
Find out what your peers are saying about ManageEngine, CrowdStrike, Netwrix and others in Active Directory Management. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.