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Red Hat Single Sign On vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 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

Red Hat Single Sign On
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Symantec Siteminder
Ranking in Single Sign-On (SSO)
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
Web Access Management (1st), Access Management (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Single Sign-On (SSO) category, the mindshare of Red Hat Single Sign On is 2.5%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Siteminder is 3.0%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
 

Featured Reviews

Giovanni Baruzzi - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable and flexible solution with some basic capabilities
I set up Red Hat Single Sign-On in half an hour. I had to install a single sign-on solution for a customer. I reviewed a list of all available products, which were no more than fifty, and analyzed them. I chose it because it was convincing, modern, and based on technology from 2015. I put my trust in this product, and after nine years, I feel confident in my decision. Deploying this solution usually takes half an hour. You need an operating system running, then deploy the packages and prepare the interfaces. I rate the initial setup a ten out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.
Siva Chalamarla - PeerSpot reviewer
Good access control and SSO but needs modernization
The access control and the SSO are the two most valuable features. Siteminder allows users to authenticate once and gain access to multiple applications without needing to reauthenticate for each application separately. For example, if you access one application in one tab, you do not need to provide it again if you are trying to access the same application. The portal has different applications built into it. It's similar to Google. If you open Google and try to access the maps in that Google, you do not need to authenticate in maps. You just need to authenticate in the starting phase. Only a particular group of people have access. Our guys will give an error called access denied or unauthorized access. It depends on the application. It is pretty easy to learn.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is very easy to scale and use as you want."
"Red Hat SSO has a lot of very concise, well laid out documentation, which is available in the free edition as well."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to assign only one password for the user at a false value."
"Good support for single sign-on protocols."
"Red Hat SSO integrates well with our other solutions. Using OIDC protocols and ITL integration, employees can authenticate with Red Hat SSO and access our microservices."
"The solution is flexible and has the same basic capabilities right out of the box. The most important feature of this product is that it is a Red double-sided product. One side is a well-known open-source project; the other is a Red Hat commercial product. The commercial product benefits from all the experience and contributions of the community, making it a very well-developed product."
"It has considerably reduced the amount of time that new users would take to join into the organization. Previously, it was a lengthy, manual process because it's a very secure environment, where they need to verify the user before they can actually grant him a user-ID and password. Integrating with the built-in custom application, and exposing CA Single Sign On to the internet, we were able to get the employees onboard. The time that we gained was: previously it would generally take from four to eight weeks for each employee, we brought it to one to two days."
"We almost never have outages nor see slowdowns."
"It's quite scalable."
"Siteminder allows us to manage identity and portability control efficiently."
"It is very scalable. We have a very large customer base: 75 million customers."
"You can quickly deploy the entire product with a basic config within couple of hours."
"It has the ability to authenticate and authorize users. It is the main feature for our security."
"It's agent-based. It's convenient to deploy and integrate."
 

Cons

"They could provide more checks and balances to find out if there have been any security lapses, e.g., if somebody is trying to break into the system. Some other products have these detection mechanisms in case someone is trying to hack into the system or find out a user's passwords."
"Red Hat publishes much more and communicates its actions and plans. They could provide words, maps, and other resources."
"Red Hat SSO's architecture could be updated."
"The product’s technical support services could be better."
"Security could be improved."
"The tech support has not been very good for us so we don't use them anymore. We have had some issues. Nobody is perfect."
"I think they need to integrate some of the newer types of authentication into the product. I'm not seeing the innovation when it comes to biometrics in the product."
"Symantec SiteMinder is not easy to set up and maintain at an infrastructure level."
"In future releases, I would like to see maybe more capabilities with some more modern authentication."
"The support could be faster."
"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."
"We would like to the OAuth be more stable, more issues being fixed rather than not."
"I'd like to see a rework of the user directory configuration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license is around $8000 USD."
"Red Hat Single Sign On is expensive."
"It is a low cost product. This product can be used by non-profit organizations or universities, when they don't want to invest a lot of money."
"If you want support, that is when you use the paid version. There are different support categories that you can pay for, which provide different support levels. E.g., there is a quick response if you pay a higher amount, where the response time is within a few hours."
"The licensing is fair for this solution."
"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
"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 solution's pricing is competitive."
"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Government
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Insurance Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Red Hat Single Sign On?
The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to assign only one password for the user at a false value.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Single Sign On?
I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Red Hat Single Sign On?
Red Hat publishes much more and communicates its actions and plans. They could provide words, maps, and other resources. Scalability could be improved, too. It could provide more documentation.
What do you like most about Symantec Siteminder?
It's agent-based. It's convenient to deploy and integrate.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Symantec Siteminder?
The maintenance fee has increased, raising concerns about the overall cost to customers.
What needs improvement with Symantec Siteminder?
The maintenance cost has increased significantly, and we are concerned about this. We also need to consider the customization or development required for web authentication when using Active Direct...
 

Also Known As

Red Hat Single Sign-On, Red Hat SSO, RH SSO, RH-SSO
SiteMinder, CA SSO, Layer7 SiteMinder
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
British Telecom, CoreBlox, DBS, HMS, Itera ASA and Simeo
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Single Sign On vs. Symantec Siteminder and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.