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One Identity Active Roles pros and cons

Vendor: One Identity
4.3 out of 5
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Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

One Identity Active Roles provides automatic provisioning, updates, and deprovisioning workflows that save time and reduce errors.
Its auditing and change history features allow for drilling down into individual objects, aiding troubleshooting and compliance.
Active Directory management is improved with features like dynamic grouping and attribute-level control.
The workflow engine offers industry-leading automation with visual PowerShell, enhancing task management efficiency.
One Identity Active Roles enhances security by using access templates to manage permissions and protect against breaches.

CONS

One Identity Active Roles supports only VBScript for scripting and lacks support for multiple scripting languages.
The absence of built-in workflows requires users to create them from scratch, which could be improved by providing pre-built workflows.
The AAD management feature needs enhancements in object management and security.
An attestation process, including certification and recertification attestation, is currently missing.
There is no automatic failover for custom tasks when a task host is down, leading to delays if the host is unavailable.
 

One Identity Active Roles Pros review quotes

reviewer1425105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 23, 2020
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.
BP
Dec 1, 2020
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.
reviewer1430811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 4, 2020
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.
Learn what your peers think about One Identity Active Roles. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
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reviewer1558140 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 19, 2021
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.
reviewer2686314 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 2, 2025
Active Roles helped reduce our identity-based breaches.
MS
Apr 3, 2019
It's valuable to us in that it resembles the native tools that most people have grown accustomed to... Active Roles resembles traditional tools, such as from Microsoft. That is really good because it eases the way people interact with the tool.
reviewer2232897 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 12, 2023
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.
Grzegorz Kosela - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 31, 2025
The ease of managing on-prem and cloud-based directories through a single pane of glass is good.
SameerPalav - PeerSpot reviewer
May 24, 2023
Secure access is the most valuable feature.
reviewer2562678 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 1, 2024
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.
 

One Identity Active Roles Cons review quotes

reviewer1425105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 23, 2020
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.
BP
Dec 1, 2020
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.
reviewer1430811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 4, 2020
The third area for improvement, which is the weakest portion of ARS, is the workflow engine, which was introduced a few years ago. It's slow and not very intuitive to use, so I would like to see improvement there.
Learn what your peers think about One Identity Active Roles. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1558140 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 19, 2021
I've had a difficult time getting it to cooperate with Azure in the cloud and, while the support staff are very good and very knowledgeable, what they assist with just on a call doesn't go deep enough to help with a number of issues. The answer that comes back is that we'd have to start an engagement with Professional Services, which is fine but that takes time to schedule and it takes budget.
reviewer2686314 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 2, 2025
The user interface needs to be more modern and scalable.
MS
Apr 3, 2019
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.
reviewer2232897 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 12, 2023
Another issue we have with the product is that we run a lot of custom tasks. You have to program them to run on one particular host and there's no automatic failover to a second host. If that host is down when a task is supposed to run, it has to wait until the next time it runs when that host is up.
Grzegorz Kosela - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 31, 2025
Additional documentation about the Angular web interface is needed.
SameerPalav - PeerSpot reviewer
May 24, 2023
The solution needs an attestation process that includes certification and recertification attestation.
reviewer2562678 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 1, 2024
It's a fairly stable product but not perfectly reliable.