Security & Compliance

  • 9 min read

SailPoint Vs. Okta: Which IAM Solution Is The Perfect Fit?

Rohit Rao

10th August, 2023

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Okta and SailPoint are two well-established identity and access management platforms. These are designed to help your IT teams protect their digital assets from lurking cyberattacks and security breaches. 

While they share similar core capabilities, both Okta and SailPoint operate in distinct ways. So, which one is the best match for your SaaSOps team's needs? This comparison blog will give you all the information you need to make the right choice between SailPoint vs. Okta.

To determine the ideal IAM platform between SailPoint vs. Okta for your SaaSOps team’s needs, you, as an IT manager, need to evaluate each tool’s distinct key capabilities. This assessment will help you make a well-informed decision regarding the tool to invest in. So, before we do a comparative analysis of both the tool’s key parameters, let's first understand what Okta and SailPoint are. 

What Is Okta?

Okta’s workforce identity cloud enables your IT team to connect your employees (digital users) to the cloud and SaaS applications. This comprehensive cloud-based solution is designed to manage, control, and govern user identities, access, and security in the cloud. Furthermore, it enables your IT team to grant secure access to apps and data from anywhere. While having control and visibility over user access and security.

It also offers an Okta integration network (OIN), an application network. It includes all the built-in features, such as provisioning, active directory (AD), single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, centralized deprovisioning of users, and flexible enterprise security and access control policies.

What Is SailPoint?

SailPoint IdentityIQ is an identity security solution that helps your IT team manage various identity and access management processes. These processes include password management, policy enforcement, access certification, and access requests. Further, it enables your IT team to control the access environment and strengthen the organization’s security posture. 

Additionally, SailPoint Identity integrates with various systems, applications, and networks. It can seamlessly operate in cloud-based, on-premise, and hybrid environments, providing a comprehensive and flexible solution for organizations of all sizes.

Now that you have a clear understanding of what Okta and SailPoint are and what they do. Let's move on and differentiate both tools (i.e., SailPoint vs. Okta) based on different parameters. 

SailPoint Vs. Okta: Comparison Based On Different Parameters 

Below, we have compared the functionalities of SailPoint vs. Okta in detail. With the help of these insights, you can select the most suitable platform to simplify the IAM process and establish a secure access environment. 

1. Falls Under Which Category And Suitable For How Many Users 

• Okta workforce identity is categorized as single sign-on (SSO), cloud directory services, and zero-trust networking. Furthermore, Okta is well-suited for organizations with 500 to 1000+ users. This makes it an ideal choice for mid-size businesses to large enterprises.

• SailPoint Identity is categorized as service password reset (SSPR) and sensitive data discovery. Furthermore, SailPoint’s IAM is most suitable for organizations with over 1,000 users, making it a perfect fit for large enterprises. 

2. Initial implementation & user experience

• Okta workforce identity’s initial implementation process is straightforward, with a clear setup process and guided configuration options. Furthermore, with its intuitive interface, your admins can manage identities and access seamlessly.

• On the other hand, the initial implementation of SailPoint identity can be more complex. It requires a more in-depth understanding of the organization's IAM requirements and the ability to configure the solution to meet them. Furthermore, it is designed for skilled users or experts and provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities. 

3. Identity Access Management 

• Okta workforce identity platform offers a universal directory, i.e., one directory for all your employees, SaaS apps, and devices. It gives your IT team a single view for multiple identity sources with AD (active directory) and LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) directory integrations. 
  
  Furthermore, your IT teams can seamlessly manage employees' profiles and app access with Okta's identity and access management system. Your team can also implement user access policies based on specific employee data such as employee's device, location, IP, group member, IP, and more. 
  
  And, to add an extra layer of security, your team can use Okta’s adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA) feature with these policies.
  
  Your team can also enforce LDAP and AD password policies and provide self-serve password resets for employees' ease. This further helps in increasing your employee’s efficiency.
  
  Your IT team can also monitor all access activities from a centralized location and generate curated reports. With the help of these reports, they can easily detect suspicious user activities or breaches. Accordingly, they can immediately prevent unauthorized access, securing the organization's crucial data. 

• On the other hand, with SailPoint identity, your IT team can improve your organization's security posture by ensuring the safety of each identity with access to resources (your SaaS apps, data, and other critical assets). How does it do that? It automates the access management process. By eliminating the manual practice, it reduces the risk of ex-employees and unauthorized third parties gaining unauthorized access. 
  
  SailPoint promptly revokes access when an employee leaves, mitigating the risk of backdoor access. It makes sure that only authorized and current users can access your SaaS apps and data.
  
  Furthermore, SailPoint enables your IT team to enforce the principle of least privilege by using roles and policy logic. This policy helps ensure that the employees are only granted the minimum access permission required for their work. This helps minimize the risk of granting excessive access privileges and security breaches. Your team can maintain a secure and well-regulated access environment by doing so.
  
  SailPoint's monitoring capabilities also excel in detecting unauthorized access attempts. By identifying such incidents, your IT team can swiftly take preventive actions, including suspending accounts or revoking access from unauthorized users.
  
  Additionally, SailPoint empowers your IT team to gain complete visibility and manage potential access risks through regular audits. These audits offer insights into access changes, ensuring that the correct access levels are granted or revoked during role transitions or other changes.

4. Seamlessly Manage Access Upon Provisioning/Deprovisioning

• Okta workforce identity reduces your IT admin workload by automating onboarding and offboarding processes. It allows your IT team to grant access based on an employee's role, designation, or department and ensures that all access is promptly revoked upon employees' departure.
  
  This streamlined approach significantly enhances the employee experience, enabling them to get up and running on their first day without unnecessary delays. It also expedites access revocation and account suspension with a few simple clicks. This further helps your team to recover software licenses and reallocate and reassign them. 
  
  Okta seamlessly integrates with your HR system to streamline auto-provisioning and deprovisioning processes. To provide your team further ease, it enables them to customize workflows without coding.
  
  It doesn't stop here. Okta's automation and integration capabilities allow your teams to efficiently assign the right applications to the right users. And securely revoke access based on triggers from various sources, including HR systems, IT resources such as AD and LDAP, and more.
  
  Furthermore, Okta conducts audits and generates reports. These reports provide details like which employees can access a specific application and which ones have had their access recently revoked. This gives your team a centralized view of users and their account access, allowing them to govern the user access management process more effectively. 

• Meanwhile, SailPoint allows your IT team to seamlessly grant, modify or revoke access whenever an employee joins, changes roles, or departs from your organization through automation. This automation not only enhances the efficiency of your IT team but also elevates the overall experience for your employees. It serves as a protective barrier against the potential risks associated with over-provisioning and unauthorized access by former employees.
  
  SailPoint goes a step further in ensuring access permissions' integrity through regular audits and active monitoring of all access points. This proactive approach effectively mitigates security threats, including unauthorized access attempts.
  
  Moreover, SailPoint offers role-based provisioning policies. These policies help ensure employees' access permissions align with their job descriptions and organizational hierarchies. This strategic approach minimizes the risk of former employees' unauthorized access. Additionally, your team can ensure that current employees have access only to what is necessary for their respective roles.

5. API Integrations

Okta's workforce and SailPoint's identity provide APIs to integrate with other applications and systems. However, the nature and scope of these APIs can be different.

• Okta's workforce identity API provides an easy way for organizations to manage user access to web and mobile applications. The API offers a wide range of functionality, including user provisioning, single sign-on (SSO), and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Okta's API is well-documented and easy to use, with many pre-built integrations available to help organizations get started quickly.

• SailPoint identity's API focuses more on providing access to the underlying identity governance and managing data stored within the SailPoint platform. The API provides programmatic access to this data, enabling organizations to automate tasks and create custom integrations with other systems. 
  
  The API is designed to be flexible and extensible and can be used to build custom integrations to meet the organization's specific needs.
  
  In conclusion, Okta's workforce and SailPoint's identity provide APIs, allowing organizations to integrate their IAM solution with other systems. However, their focus and scope can differ. Organizations should consider their specific integration requirements when choosing between Okta and SailPoint.

6. Pricing Structure & Customer Rating

Okta vs SailPoint are efficient solutions, but they have different pricing structures.

• Okta offers a subscription-based pricing model, where customers pay based on the number of active users per month. The pricing starts at $2 per user per month for the basic SSO package and goes up depending on the features and services required.

• SailPoint has a license-based pricing model where customers purchase licenses for a set number of users. 
  
  The pricing for SailPoint is typically higher than Okta and is quoted on a per-project basis, taking into account the specific needs and requirements of the customer. SailPoint also offers a pricing model for on-premise deployments, often more expensive than the cloud-based deployment option.
  
  It's worth noting that Okta and SailPoint offer various discounts and promotions occasionally. So, checking with the vendor for the latest pricing information is always a good idea. Both Okta and SailPoint offer free trials, so you can test their solutions and compare them to evaluate the best fit for your organization's needs and budget.

Okta Vs SailPoint: Customer Rating 

• Okta Workforce Identity:  G2- 4.5/5, Capterra- 4.7/5

• Sailpoint IdentityIQ: G2- 4.4/5, Capterra- 4.2/5

SailPoint Vs. Okta Comparison Table 

Here is a comparison table of Okta vs SailPoint that will help you decide which one is more suitable for your organization. 

After closely comparing the two (Okta vs SailPoint), you must know which will be more suitable for streamlining your identity and access management processes. However, it's not a compulsion to only consider these two tools to manage your access environment; other access management platforms might also be more suitable for your IT team’s specific requirement than Okta and SailPoint. One such tool that stands out among the competitors is Zluri. So, what is Zluri? How does it work? To learn about it, read more. 

Zluri: Your All-In-One Access Management Solution 

As organizations continue to adopt more and more SaaS applications and promote a remote working culture, there has been a noticeable surge in surface attacks. This increase presents a significant challenge for IT teams in managing user access to an organization’s SaaS app data. 

So, to address this pressing concern, Zluri, an intelligent modern access management solution, comes to the rescue. It is designed to help your IT team streamline and simplify the provisioning, access modification, and deprovisioning process, enforce access policy, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. Let’s see what benefits it offers in detail: 

1. Seamlessly Manages Employees’s Access To SaaS App 

Zluri integrates with your organization’s HR system to provide your IT team with up-to-date employee data. Further, with the help of this integration, Zluri automatically retrieves and displays all the employee data on a centralized dashboard. With this visibility, your IT team can easily verify employee details without manual effort and grant, modify, and revoke access accordingly. 

This helps your IT team ensure the right employee has the right level of access to the right applications at the right time. Also, it timely revokes all access upon employee departure to prevent security breaches. Not only that, it also improves employee experience and productivity, as they don’t have to wait for days to gain access to applications.

2. Allows Your IT Team To Keep Track Of All The Access Activities

With Zluri, your IT team can monitor all the access activities that are taking place in your organization, including:

• Which users have access to all applications? 

• How frequently do they use the SaaS applications? 

• What is their status, whether they are active or inactive (by evaluating the user’s login and logout time)? 

• What level of permissions do they hold?

• Which role, position, or department are they from, and the other details your team needs to know to effectively manage user access? 
  
  Your IT team can easily understand the access patterns/user behavior by monitoring these access activities. This will further help them ensure that only authorized users access the organization's sensitive SaaS app data. Also, this allows your IT team to maintain a well-governed and secure environment.

3. Enables Your IT Team To Conduct Regular Access Audits And Generate Curated Reports

Access permissions sometimes remain unchanged even when they are no longer needed. This stagnant access creates a potential security risk, as unauthorized individuals might exploit these permissions to gain access to sensitive data and potentially cause a breach.

So, with Zluri, your IT team can conduct regular access audits to mitigate this issue. These audits involve reviewing existing access permissions to determine their continued necessity. 

Also, it generates curated reports, which enable your IT team to detect unauthorized users, users accessing critical apps (apps with high-risk scores), and more. This further helps your IT team to take preventative measures to secure sensitive SaaS app data from potential security breaches. 

4. Enables Your IT Team To Enforce Security Policies

Zluri enables your IT team to enforce segregation of duty policy (SoD), role-based access control (RBAC), and the principle of least privilege (PoLP). 

• By enforcing the segregation of duty policy, Zluri enables your IT team to ensure no two individuals are responsible for completing one task. 
  
  For example, the IT admin that grants access to employees can not be the one to review the access; another team will be responsible for it. This is done to prevent any biases during the decision-making process. 

• By implementing role-based access control, Zluri enables your IT team to ensure the access permissions align with the user's roles and responsibilities. 
  
  For example, HR department employees should be granted access to HR applications like BambooHR, not SpendFlo, a finance app.

• By enforcing the principle of least privilege, Zluri enables your IT team to ensure minimum access permissions should be granted to employees. This allows your team to avoid over-provisioning or granting excessive privilege.  
  
  Also, these policies are necessary to implement because they are part of security requirements for most compliance regulatory standards, such as ISO 27001, SOX 2, and more. 
  
  Zluri is not restricted to this only; it offers your IT team an alert feature. This feature notifies your IT team when employees try to access critical applications or there are any unauthorized access attempts. With the help of these alerts, your team can immediately take preventative measures to secure the organization's critical SaaS app data. 
  
  So now that you know what all Zluri offers to streamline the identity access management process, why not book a demo now? And experience it firsthand; you never know if it can perfectly fit your organization.

Also Read: How to Choose an Identity Access Management Tool: A Guide for IT Teams

About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.