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One Identity Active Roles vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 9, 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

One Identity Active Roles
Ranking in Active Directory Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
User Provisioning Software (5th), Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) (5th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Active Directory Management
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (16th), Server Monitoring (9th)
 

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 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.0%, down from 1.7% 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.
Subhajit Nag - PeerSpot reviewer
The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow
SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It gives us attribute-level control and the AD management features work very well."
"The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good."
"It is an easier way for me to manage Active Directory with more advanced features."
"Active Roles improved the management of users, groups, and AD objects in the organization."
"The biggest thing for us is Active Roles saves a lot of man-hours in keeping groups up-to-date manually or trying to write some sort of script that you have to run, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Instead of when every time somebody joins a department, then somebody has to remember to put in a request to add "meet user Joe" to this group, the solution does it automatically for us. Therefore, it saves our business and IT staff time because they do not have to process requests since Active Role can do it for them."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable features include auditing, dynamic grouping, and creating dynamic groups based on AD attributes."
"Having a tool to manage all changes to AD from a single pane of glass is awesome."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
 

Cons

"The way you can search groups could be better."
"It's a fairly stable product but not perfectly reliable."
"In terms of improvement, it could be made even more user-friendly for administrators when they need to create new workflows and rule sets."
"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."
"The ability to send logs to a SIEM would be very beneficial."
"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."
"For the AAD management feature, it needs to improve the objects that we can manage and the security."
"The solution needs an attestation process that includes certification and recertification attestation."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's fairly priced."
"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 licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated."
"It's expensive."
"The pricing for Active Roles is expensive but not as expensive as other solutions like Okta."
"The pricing is on the higher end."
"The price is reasonable. It costs us about 1 million Danish kroner annually, and we also spend about half as much on consultants."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Educational Organization
45%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

Also Known As

Quest Active Roles
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

City of Frankfurt, Moore Public Schools, George Washington University, Transavia Airlines, Howard County, MD. See all stories at OneIdentity.com/casestudies
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about One Identity Active Roles vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.