What is our primary use case?
It is mainly an identity governance tool. It is being used to collect, for example, any new employee records or employee records in general from HR systems, such as Oracle, SAP, and Workday, and then push it downstream for systems such as Active Directory, Exchange, etc. This is the main functionality of it.
The other functionality for it is to have a request platform, such as a web portal, for requests for access, approval, and user-based grants and reviews.
How has it helped my organization?
It helps the organization to simplify its control over enterprise access and makes the new joiner's process easier. In a small organization with 40 to 50 users, it is not a big deal. You can have one IT guy who is responsible for creating an email account, Active Directory account, Azure account, etc. It will take him one or two days to do it, but in a big corporation with more than 500 employees in different time zones, doing that is a big challenge. One Identity, and IGA products in general, excel at onboarding and offboarding employees with the linking and synchronization with the HR system. This is what they are best at. They remove the complexity because you have your Active Directory created, updated, and disabled on time, and there is no issue with that.
There is one fabric for identity lifecycle management, and the access is based on that identity lifecycle management. This is applicable to the whole market for identity governance. It is not just One Identity. You have SailPoint, Saviynt, and others. All of them are good in this aspect. They do improve the organization like that.
We can customize it to integrate with any system or application, and we can go deeper in analyzing people's access, creating roles, dynamic roles, and RBAC. They have a very strong RBAC offering, which is a role-based access model offering. If you structure it right, you can do an RBAC with One Identity. I use it for two customers. One is in the Middle East and one is in Europe. I represent the client side, and mostly I see a robust onboarding and offboarding operation with this product. It is very good for both experiences. It is a very structured way of doing things. Movements across the departments and things like that can be handled. It is quite customizable. It is quite good.
When it comes to intuitiveness, the clients using IT Shop people are complaining. I have had a client in the Middle East, and then I have had a client in Europe. They all say that IT Shop is not intuitive. It is the same feedback. One Identity is trying to make it better with Angular, but there is a fifty-fifty split. One aspect is how the vendor has designed the portal and the other aspect is how you structure the request and approval process. We are as guilty as the vendor. The vendor has a bad portal, but most of us also have a bad way of thinking as clients. People are not advised well because the adoption and the usage should be driven by the vendor. Instead of doing that, the vendor is just selling. If you talk to a partner, they might advise you, but if you have the wrong partner, you are in trouble. So, people complain about the intuitiveness of the portal, but they are confused because the process is being showcased in a very bad way.
To customize IT Shop, they had a strange tool called Web Designer. It is one of the seven tools or seven clients they had. It was not easy to find anyone worldwide who knew how to handle it. You can find developers who have One Identity skill set, but only one out of ten of them would know how to handle the designer tool. In case you need to customize, it was a tough journey. That is why One Identity flipped the narrative by saying that they are going with Angular. We need to run Angular, and they have the REST API. I told them that this is a bad approach because they are assuming that clients have Angular developers, but some clients or some small clients do not have Angular developers. Some clients might have Angular developers but they are assigned to all business units. They are asking us to start hiring an Angular developer or rely on a partner, but is their partner certified to do Angular or not? To me, they did this conversion without any proper thinking or from a very narrow perspective.
I do not have complaints about the backend of this tool. Frontend is a major issue. Their roadmap has no consideration for the clients. In the CAB meetings, I have seen how they manage relationships in general. The company mindset is a bit strange. They look at big clients for feedback and opinions, but they do not look at small and medium businesses. They do not care about hearing us, but when it comes to big companies, you see their engineering team circling around them. They have this cultural problem in the company. They are not only selling the products to just a few big companies worldwide. They are selling it to everyone, but there is a lack of inclusiveness. They assume that all the clients have the same technical skill sets to operate this tool, but that is not true. There is an issue with their roadmap and way of thinking. I have also provided this feedback to the head of the company, Mark Logan, during a cab meeting. I told him that they need to fix how they collect feedback and maintain customer relationships.
We use business roles to map company structures for dynamic application provisioning. It is very good for that. It works very well. If you implement it right and you are advised very well, it can be magic. It can make people very happy about the tool in the company, which was the case when I was working in the Middle East for my first employer. If you do it wrong or are not advised well about it, it can lead to disaster, which is the case with my new employer where I have been working for two years. We have reached a point where we have 50 roles with the same entitlements, and people do not know which one is which. It is not the fault of the tool. The lack of advice on how to structure and design it well can lead to issues. It is not a technical issue. From a technical perspective, it is very flexible. It can do whatever you want. Partner implementation is the main issue.
It can help minimize gaps in governance coverage among test, dev, and production servers, but I have not seen it in practice. Some people do it where you can connect One Identity to One Identity Manager with a direct connection. You can have that. That is one option. The second option is something called transport packages, so it has a good change management label and transport package solution. They have a partner called Intragen, which is a Dutch partner, that created a new product called Deployment Manager. That product does the release management process and testing for CI/CD to a very good level and in an automated fashion. You can buy a product like that and hook it up to One Identity. The tool has the framework to handle this. It is okay in that sense. From a change management and release management perspective, the product has principles. It is not lacking there, but it needs modernization for complete CI/CD.
It is very good at helping you streamline application compliance and application auditing if you know how to integrate applications. Most IAM programs or projects focus on users and users in groups, but handling single entitlements or a cluster of entitlements is a different board game. However, I cannot say that it is a One Identity problem. One Identity is customizable, and it is equipped to do that. You can do that. It is an investment issue rather than a One Identity issue.
What is most valuable?
The best feature of this solution is its flexibility to be customized. It is like a framework. You can customize it very far from its core functionality, and it will still work.
The second best thing about the product is that it is rich in concepts of orchestration and event-driven architecture. It works well if you have a development team. For a team that has developers with VB, .NET, or C# skills, it is a very good product.
Another thing that is good about this product is its stability. In general, it is very stable. It does not go down that easily. It does not crash frequently. Especially since version 7 or 8, accessibility has been a very good factor. These are the main aspects that make it one of the best products.
What needs improvement?
In terms of providing a single platform for enterprise-level administration and governance of users, data, and privileged accounts, One Identity is not yet there. One Identity recently bought OneLogin. They already had Safeguard and One Identity Manager. They have started integrating these three tools. I am also on the customer advisory board (CAB) of One Identity, so I have more insight into these things. I know that they started to integrate OneLogin and One Identity just recently. OneLogin is their access management tool. They use it for authentication and for SSO. It is a competitor for Entra and Okta, whereas Safeguard is competing with CyberArk, Delinea, and BeyondTrust. One Identity has indeed done good integration between their three products. However, the platform is not unified. You still need three URLs, which is not optimal. They are going there, but it will take them time.
The second thing they are not yet good at is their SaaS offering. They are behind in the market. They started with something in Safeguard, but it is a pretty basic offering. It is still a new baby. They have Safeguard On Demand, but it is just a hosted PAM solution. I did PoC for Safeguard twice. This is how I know this, but I have not used it. As PAM, Safeguard is a good product, but it is not a full-featured PAM like CyberArk or BeyondTrust. They are lacking in that aspect.
The integration between One Identity's products is similar to BMC's integration. I used to work with BMC products such as BMC Remedy ten years ago. I used to be an ITSM or Control-M guy. When BMC integrated its products, the integration was not well done. It was like two different entities trying to integrate with each other rather than one company giving you a fully-fledged platform. The same thing is happening with One Identity Manager at the moment. They are selling it as a unified platform, but in my opinion, it is not yet good. It is also not bad. There are things that I can take from it, but there is no complete picture. The problem nowadays is that vendors are getting into each other's areas. For example, CyberArk used to be just a PAM provider, so people would integrate with it, but now, CyberArk wants to do the identity bit. It has now become a competitor for other vendors, so they will stop integrating with it. SailPoint, at some point, stopped integrating with CyberArk. SailPoint and CyberArk's integration was good. This is what is happening in the market or between vendors. All of them are getting into each other's area. If you happen to buy another product from a competitor, you need to integrate it on your own. There is no integration plug-in concept between them. This is a bit hard for companies that already have a PAM and they want to buy a new IGA, for example, or vice versa.
They are trying to shift towards an Angular-based platform for their web portal or for IT Shop. That has been very long overdue because they did not modernize their web portal for almost three versions. They are doing it, but there is no feature parity till version 9.3, which is the upcoming version. This is a problem. For example, data governance is not included in 9.2 if you want to upgrade, but if you do not upgrade, you lose support. They have these issues with the roadmap in general. They give you options, but they are not always the complete options. To me, it seems that this company is going to suffer in the long run.
Another issue is that for admin requests, we have to configure the tool at least in seven different clients, which is unacceptable. We are in 2024, not in 1981 or 1985. Having seven clients for the same tool, or more, is just unheard of. To me, that is a very old design idea. I am on the newest version 9.2, and I am still doing that. To me, that is a big problem as an admin.
The relationship with the customers is extremely bad. That is not a technical problem. That is a company problem. They tried to fix that, but it seems they failed. They do not have the personnel. They have a hiring problem. They now rely on partners. They are a type of company where the partner is more of a vendor to you as a client rather than the company itself. If you want to pick any solution by One Identity, you need a very strong partner with you. If you do not, you will struggle with this product's adoption, roadmap, vision, and implementation. We struggle a lot as a client. I have been there. I have seen that. It is not easy with them. One Identity is based in Europe. Our account manager at One Identity resigned in May and till now, just to show how bad they are, we do not know who our new account manager is. We are in August.
Their Starling Connect roadmap or flagship is a failure. We had to withdraw from using it with SuccessFactors, for example. It had a lot of stability issues. Now, my understanding is better, but it caused a bad implementation, so we are not using it. They are not investing a lot in enhancing or extending Starling Connect. They are using Starling Connect as a propagation gateway to SaaS apps so that you have One Identity Manager on-prem talking to Starling Connect which is handling all SaaS apps. However, the roadmap for Starling Connect is not clear. Now that they have bought OneLogin, OneLogin can do that as well as an IAM tool. You can now bring any IAM or CIAM tool such as Entra, Okta, or OneLogin. They can be your propagation gateway. OneLogin and Starling Connect are competing products, and they need to unify them. They cannot have both products doing the same thing. When I discussed this with the head of engineering from their side, they were still defending having Starling Connect. I do not understand why because if you have a proper IAM such as Entra or Okta, that is your propagation gateway. That is it. You can do everything you want with it. You can merge the functionality, and that is it. You do not need Starling Connect. To me, this is confusing. You use a propagation gateway like Starling Connect because it has ready plug-ins to connect to SaaS apps and you do not need to create a custom connector every time. If you look at the number of apps that One Identity supports with Starling Connect, there are not more than 50, which is not a lot. There is a big difference when you compare it to Okta Marketplace or Entra Marketplace. You will immediately understand the difference. OneLogin's marketplace is better than Starling Connect, but OneLogin was not a part of One Identity before, so they had their own marketplace. Overall, the Starling Connect roadmap does not make sense to me.
They need to remove the dependency on VB.NET for backend development and they need to unify the front end. If they are selling it as a unified product, they need to give me a unified UX. This is something I have mentioned to Mark Logan himself. This is how ServiceNow won over Remedy. Having a unified UX and being able to turn on or off a feature is better than trying to connect three or four different products with different contracts. To me, the main thing is that they need to modernize their application. Once we do that, making it SaaS is doable.
Buyer's Guide
One Identity Manager
March 2026
Learn what your peers think about One Identity Manager. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution since 2018.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate it a six out of ten for scalability.
About 25% of the company uses this solution. If the company has 4,000 people, at least 1,000 people use it. It is quite a well-known product. It is not just a niche one. It is a mainstream product. People use it. We have 30 branches all around the world, and all of them use it. We are hosting it centrally in Switzerland.
How are customer service and support?
I use their regular support because their premium support is useless to me. Their support, in general, is useless most of the time.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The main thing that makes this solution stand out as compared to others is the ability to customize it, especially when it is on-prem. It is cheap from a licensing perspective. Once you pay, it is very cheap to operate if you have a good development team. It is also extremely stable. At the backend, it is well-designed. However, it lacks AI. When you go SaaS, you can put AI and all of that stuff, but if you are on-prem, you do not have AI.
How was the initial setup?
It is deployed on-prem. Its deployment is complex.
By design, it is well-engineered. The idea is that the database pushes everything, so you need to focus while updating or installing the database. If the database is installed correctly with schemas, it has DLLs. Whenever you install a client, it distributes to the connecting client, so it is designed with this centric approach. However, sometimes, you end up with situations related to encryption, a missing component, or a missing instruction that you did not account for.
Recently, I upgraded from version 8 to 9, it took 14 hours of work to do an in-place upgrade. It was not a migration. That is too much. We had a team of five people including developers. It was not easy. It took us two months to do the upgrade. It is always like that because you need to do complete testing. A small problem with One Identity is that they remove a functionality but do not tell you about it, so you need to test. If you are giving me this product that can be customized, I will use the methods that you have. If you change how a method behaves and do not tell me, I get into trouble. Only a very strong partner would know about all this. With a small partner, you will have an issue.
It does not require much maintenance or patching. That is not an issue with One Identity. You do not need to restart it once a month. It is very stable. From time to time, you might have some issues that require a restart but not all the time. It is not like some Java applications that require a restart every month.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
On-premises, it is cheap. It is way cheaper than others. The cost of the hosted one varies. They do offer a hosted one, and its cost varies, but it is not that expensive. You have a license for employees and a license for support.
The problem is that people try to compare it with an IAM solution such as Okta or Entra, but they are different products. It should not be compared to them. The only ones you can compare it with are SailPoint or Saviynt. In my head, the rest are not even IGA products. SailPoint is much more expensive to operate than One Identity. If you go SaaS, SailPoint is way more expensive, but that is the whole point of SaaS. SaaS is more expensive anyway.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution only if you have a very strong partner. Otherwise, do not go close to this solution.
We use One Identity Manager to manage SAP, but in our case, we have connected with CUA, so we have one single point of interface with SAP. That helps a little bit to make the management less complex. If we did not have CUA, we would have had to connect individually. CUA is straightforward. We connect to it. We push through CUA, and we sync everything. We have thousands of roles.
It provides IGA to some extent for the difficult-to-manage aspects of SAP. At the moment, with CUA, we do clients, profiles, etc. They recently added something called behavior-driven governance on SAP. We have not used it, but we can basically check if someone is using his account in SAP or not, and then we can do a user-based access review for his access. We can see what he used within SAP, which is good. We can also do combinations where if we have this role, we should not have that role in SAP, which is very good.
One Identity gives you a lot of features, but you need a proper program to drive it. If you do not know how to use it, you will stay at the basic level. Technically, the product is well-capable, but the caveat is that it is a framework product. You need to have a development team. You cannot just do it with a normal admin. You need a development team for this product.
Versions 9.2 and above have something for assisted approval. I have not used it, but from what I have read, you can see who in the same team has the same access. It will tell you whether it is an anomaly or a common request. The same thing is there for user baseline reviews. That is a good thing.
Overall, I would rate this solution a five out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.