Report:

Magic Quadrant for Access Management

Top Vendor Products for Access Management in 2025

• IBM
• Microsoft
• Okta
• Ping Identity
• Transmit Security

Access Management Vendor Product Comparisons 2025

• CyberArk - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Product: CyberArk has above-average capabilities for access control (including adaptive access), machine IAM capabilities, and delegated administration.
  • Innovation: CyberArk has invested a higher-than-average percentage of revenue toward innovation, and its innovation plan includes product and nontechnical (CyberArk business process) enhancements.
  • Sales strategy: CyberArk's sales strategy is supported by its strong partner ecosystem, vertical market expertise, and ongoing focus on customer success.
  • Customer experience: CyberArk's customers benefit from a recently redesigned administration interface, accelerated customer onboarding features, and supplementary tools that improve and simplify administration tasks.

  Cons:

  • Business model: Following Palo Alto Networks' acquisition of CyberArk, changes in branding, sales channels, and go-to-market messaging may result in confusion for both existing and prospective clients. Integration with Palo Alto Networks' existing security offerings may also introduce new complexity.
  • Market understanding: CyberArk continues to influence its market understanding using its adjacent tooling, making it potentially less likely to adjust and respond to AM market emerging capabilities and product differentiators.
  • Market execution: CyberArk has lower brand visibility for its access management solutions compared to its peers.
  • Sales execution: Although CyberArk's standard workforce offering is priced competitively, its enterprise Workforce offering, which includes additional security controls, may present budgetary challenges for organizations seeking a cost-effective solution.


• Entrust - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Sales strategy: Entrust tailors its sales strategy to address vertical-specific challenges, such as regulated verticals, compliance, and fraud prevention.
  • Market understanding: Entrust's market intelligence is strongly aligned with AM market realities, including a clear view of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the market.
  • Marketing strategy: Entrust leverages its broad portfolio, including Identity Verification, to offer comprehensive, integrated solutions for customers, allowing it to cross-sell and bundle its products.
  • Market responsiveness: Entrust has responded positively to market demands. Examples of this include its first authentication journey orchestration for CIAM use cases, identity verification deepfake detection and enhancements to its Entrust Identity App, which now supports device-bound passkeys.

  Cons:

  • Geographic strategy: Entrust's direct sales, partner networks and service infrastructure are mainly located in North America, Europe and Latin America. Therefore, organizations in other parts of the world should carefully assess Entrust's geographical strategy to ensure alignment with their global deployment and compliance needs.
  • Viability: Entrust does not have the same global market share as larger AM providers, impacting its availability of third-party integrations, community support and partner resources.
  • Marketing execution: Entrust has lower AM visibility and reduced brand recognition in the global space.
  • Product: Entrust provides connectors for legacy systems; however, some organizations may encounter challenges when attempting deep customization or integration with highly custom or outdated applications.


• IBM - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Sales strategy: IBM competes effectively in the AM market from a sales strategy built on global brand strength, large customer base, vertical specialization, and partner ecosystem.
  • Market responsiveness: IBM has introduced new features such as enhanced multifactor authentication options, improved user experience for self-service registration, and expanded support for social login providers, demonstrating responsiveness to evolving customer needs and security trends.
  • Product: IBM has strong product capabilities for identity data, profile and life cycle management (for both workforce and customer); partner management and delegated administration, orchestration and extensibility; and service resilience.
  • Innovation: IBM has a robust near-term and long-term innovation plan, combined with higher-than-average innovation investment for the AM market that is strongly market-aligned.

  Cons:

  • Marketing strategy: IBM's extensive security portfolio can infrequently dilute or obscure the specific value proposition of its AM platform. As a result, potential customers focused on AM solutions or evaluations may be less likely to understand how IBM's AM offering is relevant to them.
  • Customer experience: IBM's complex user journeys for CIAM can be time-consuming. Organizations may find themselves planning for additional training, support and resources to mitigate potential delays during implementation. However, IBM mitigates this challenge by offering its orchestration engine at no cost, enabling low-code creation of user journeys to streamline deployment and reduce overhead.
  • Business model: IBM's reliance on long-term contracts and enterprise-level commitments may limit flexibility for organizations seeking agile, consumption-based pricing or the ability to scale services up and down in response to changing business needs.
  • Sales execution: IBM has augmented its sales execution to also include a select coverage model, product-led growth, and an expanded partner ecosystem to make IBM Verify more accessible and scalable. Organizations of all sizes should carefully assess whether these changes fully address their specific requirements and support needs before adoption.


• Microsoft - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Sales strategy: Microsoft's AM offerings benefit from its most popular products by bundling its AM offering with widely used Microsoft products, making AM less expensive to acquire relative to its competitors.
  • Geographic strategy: Microsoft's AM offering excels in geographic strategy through its global infrastructure, localized partner ecosystem, and scalable architecture, enabling organizations to support workforce and customer identities across diverse regions and regulatory compliance.
  • Viability: Microsoft demonstrates exceptional viability due to its financial strength, global infrastructure, security leadership, compliance coverage, and its commitment to ongoing enhancements.
  • Product: Microsoft's security products remain a strong differentiator due to its generative AI features, machine access management support, and robust AM capabilities for both workforce and CIAM — including identity life cycle management, authentication, and adaptive access.

  Cons:

  • Customer experience: While integration with Microsoft services is seamless, connecting with third-party or legacy applications may require additional effort and technical resources.
  • Business model: Microsoft tends to bundle its products and offer discounts that could lead to vendor-lock in and high reliance, making it difficult and costly to migrate to alternative AM solutions.
  • Marketing strategy: Microsoft positions its AM solution as an integrated component of its comprehensive security platform. While this approach emphasizes the advantages of a unified security ecosystem, it can make it difficult for prospective customers to clearly identify and assess the unique capabilities, features and differentiators specific to Microsoft's AM solution.
  • Product: Microsoft Entra ID does not have granular visual user journey orchestration capabilities, but offers extensibility points on the authentication flow, as well as platform-native authentication APIs to customize the desired user journey.


• Okta - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Sales strategy: Okta's sales strategy strengths include its global market recognition, strong partner ecosystem, and unique customer onboarding processes.
  • Vertical strategy: Okta offers prebuilt integrations and customizable workflows tailored to many different verticals, enabling organizations to address the unique needs and regulatory requirements of diverse industries.
  • Product: Okta delivers a set of AM products that have above-average capability for all constituencies, and it excels in supporting application development scenarios.
  • Marketing execution: Okta's marketing initiatives are not only thorough in their coverage of product features, but also carefully aligned with evolving market trends and customer needs.

  Cons:

  • Operations: Okta's net-new customer growth in 2025 was lower than some peers included in this research. This dynamic reflects both intensified competition from established and emerging AM vendors, as well as a trend among organizations to deepen adoption with existing providers by expanding into broader identity capabilities.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Okta offers both a-la-carte and bundled pricing models, which may lead to contract renewal restructuring conversations and additional questions from net-new customers to help them select the pricing model aligned with their current business requirements.
  • Product strategy: Okta does not yet natively support W3C verifiable credentials, though this is on its roadmap. Its identity verification is delivered through standards-based integrations embedded into native flows, rather than a proprietary solution — an approach that may not suit customers seeking a single-vendor option.
  • Marketing strategy: Okta's marketing emphasizes broad applicability, rapid deployment and ease of use. Prospective customers should still evaluate the full scope of product ownership to ensure alignment with their specific requirements and implementation complexity.


• Ping Identity - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Ping Identity's product capabilities are above-average for all user constituencies covered in this research. Its strengths include partner management, delegated administration, portable and decentralized identity, orchestration and extensibility, API access control, and machine access management.
  • Market understanding: Ping Identity has demonstrated exceptional performance within highly regulated markets, delivering solutions tailored to banking and financial markets, including deepfake protection measures, as well as protection against sophisticated identity fraud attacks and impersonation threats.
  • Marketing strategy: Ping Identity has substantially invested both time and money in its marketing strategy this year, resulting in strong market intelligence and a clear understanding of its product positioning.
  • Customer experience: Ping Identity has enhanced customer experience through personalized journeys and customer engagements.

  Cons:

  • Business model: Ping Identity has traditionally concentrated on serving midsize to large enterprises, which may lead to a perception that it cannot serve small business needs.
  • Geographic strategy: Ping Identity's customer base is primarily concentrated in North America and Europe. While the company is expanding its presence in APAC and South America, sales coverage in these regions may not be as extensive as in its core markets.
  • Market responsiveness: Since the acquisition of ForgeRock, organizations should be aware of potential challenges in Ping Identity's ability to maintain its historically agile market responsiveness.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Ping Identity's pricing across multiple scenarios assessed in this research is above market averages, particularly for workforce and partner use cases, when compared to other vendors.


• Thales - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Thales has demonstrated an understanding of the distinct requirements and regulatory complexities that characterize the AM market within the European Union. This experience has benefited it in helping customers in navigating EU-specific mandates such as GDPR, eIDAS, and sectoral compliance standards.
  • Innovation: Thales' strengths in innovation are reflected in its adaptive authentication, biometric verification, and real-time risk-based assessment controls for fraud prevention and account takeover (ATO) protection.
  • Customer experience: Thales has a strong focus for its customers within regulated industries, offering specialized compliance support and integration expertise for complex environments.
  • Product: Thales' product capabilities are excellent for partner management and delegated administration, as well as for identity data, profile, and life cycle management for customers and partners, including numerous national identity providers and other verifiable credentials.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution/pricing: Thales' complex pricing structure is based on user volumes, deployment models (cloud, on-premises, hybrid), and feature sets. Lack of transparent pricing or unclear cost breakdowns can deter prospects, especially when compared to competitors offering straightforward subscription models.
  • Business model: Certain compliance or data residency features may be available only in specific regions or as add-ons, potentially increasing costs for multinational organizations with diverse regulatory requirements.
  • Product: Thales' current product offering has below-average capabilities for machine access management, and for authorization and adaptive access capabilities for workforce.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: Thales lacks some certifications required by certain regulated sectors, such as FedRAMP for U.S. federal government agencies. Organizations operating in this sector should conduct thorough due diligence to ensure that Thales meets all necessary certification standards.


• Transmit Security - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product: Transmit Security's product capabilities are above-average in passwordless authentication, adaptive authentication, orchestration, ITDR and native fraud detection, making it well-suited for regulated and high-assurance environments.
  • Customer experience: Transmit Security offers a strong overall customer experience, including passwordless authentication and streamlined digital identity journeys.
  • Marketing execution: Transmit Security's go-to-market approach for Mosaic leverages a combination of direct sales, channel partnerships and strategic alliances.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Transmit Security has one of the highest sales efficiency ratios of all AM vendors evaluated. It offers clear, straightforward bundled pricing models, enabling organizations to accurately forecast costs.

  Cons:

  • Geographic strategy: While Transmit Security maintains a more focused geographic field presence than some peers, global organizations should validate its fit for their specific requirements.
  • Marketing strategy: Transmit Security primarily focuses on large and extra-large enterprises. This emphasis on its marketing strategy often leads small and midsize businesses to consider alternative AM vendors that offer solutions better-suited to their scale, operational simplicity, and cost considerations.
  • Vertical/industry strategy: Transmit Security has established expertise in financial services and is expanding into other regulated industries such as telecom, retail, and transportation. Clients should carefully assess whether the platform meets their specific compliance requirements to ensure regulatory alignment and avoid potential gaps.
  • Business model: Transmit Security's business model is primarily focused on CIAM. However, the company also offers a limited workforce AM solution, delivering a reduced suite of core features compared to the AM vendors evaluated in this research.


• Alibaba Cloud - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Marketing strategy: Alibaba Cloud's marketing strategy depends on strong regional brand recognition and strategic partnerships.
  • Innovation: Alibaba Cloud has allocated a greater-than-average proportion of its business revenue to innovation, encompassing both product development and nontechnical initiatives within its strategic innovation plan.
  • Vertical strategy: Alibaba Cloud offers strong regulatory compliance, scalability, industry-specific features, and proven success across multiple verticals within its main geolocation, making it attractive for organizations in highly regulated, high-volume and rapidly evolving markets.
  • Customer experience: Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure supports mission-critical workloads, high availability and has a reputation for reliability. Customers benefit from rapid resource provisioning and autoscaling capabilities, enabling them to efficiently manage fluctuating workloads and business growth.

  Cons:

  • Product: Alibaba Cloud's IDaaS product offers limited global compliance certifications and regional data residency choices, which can create challenges for organizations with worldwide operations.
  • Geographic strategy: Alibaba Cloud's global expansion is challenged by geopolitical risks and major competition from established North American AM providers. Potential customers should ensure that Alibaba Cloud can address international data privacy and regulatory compliance laws if outside its primary region.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Alibaba Cloud offers complex pricing models with various product tiers; service fees and professional services fees are automatically added in. Base workforce and CIAM pricing tiers were below-average, compared with other AM vendors evaluated in this research. Potential customers could find it challenging to understand the total cost of ownership.
  • Market responsiveness: Alibaba Cloud may prioritize the needs of its primary user base in local regions, potentially lagging in delivering enhancements and integrations, and capturing emerging trends specifically tailored to international customers.


• One Identity - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Marketing strategy: One Identity's marketing strategy is well-aligned with current market needs and emphasizes the company and product's strengths, including AM market expertise and its product offerings in adjacent IAM markets.
  • Sales execution: One Identity positions its AM solution as part of an overall unified suite. This integrated approach enables the sales team to address a broad range of customer needs, cross-sell, and drive larger, multisolution deals.
  • Market understanding: One Identity demonstrates stronger-than-average market understanding, including full consideration for all market drivers (security, compliance, user experience, cost/ease of implementation and support).
  • Vertical/industry strategy: One Identity's ongoing regional investments and localized delivery capabilities support its ability to serve organizations in different geographic and cultural contexts, resulting in a large customer base and strong partnerships.

  Cons:

  • Market responsiveness: One Identity's slower response to integrating emerging features and market responsiveness may erode its competitive position in the AM market.
  • Product: One Identity's authorization and adaptive access, portable and decentralized identity, and API access control is average when compared to other AM vendors evaluated in this research.
  • Marketing execution: One Identity has less market visibility and less name awareness compared to other AM vendors evaluated in this research, particularly in regions or verticals where competitors have established stronger brand equity.
  • Customer experience: One Identity's workflows configuration can be complex, particularly for organizations without prior experience in AM or those with limited in-house technical expertise.


• OpenText - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Viability: OpenText AM is offered as part of a broader suite of security and information management solutions, allowing seamless integration with other OpenText products and third-party applications.
  • Market understanding: OpenText targets messaging for verticals such as healthcare, financial services, and government, highlighting features and benefits that resonate with the unique operational and regulatory demands of these industries.
  • Customer experience: OpenText delivers flexible, secure, and user-centric experiences through automated features, adaptive authentication, and strong privacy controls. These strengths contribute to higher user satisfaction, increased trust, and improved customer retention.
  • Product: OpenText's product set is above-average in the market for identity data, progressive profiling, life cycle management for workforce, and highly flexible directory service, making OpenText a forward-thinking AM vendor.

  Cons:

  • Marketing strategy: OpenText faces difficulties in achieving strong brand recognition, resulting in continuous adaptation and adjustments in its messaging and branding strategies to distinguish itself in the highly competitive AM landscape.
  • Pricing: OpenText's pricing demonstrates inconsistency across various scenarios examined in this research, with costs for small and midsize deployments exceeding the average for the AM market.
  • Operations: OpenText's SaaS version does not hold key compliance certifications, including FedRAMP and SOC 2.
  • Geographic strategy: OpenText's SaaS version does not currently provide flexible data residency options or data storage locations. Failure to address data sovereignty concerns can restrict market access.


• RSA - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Customer experience: RSA offers an enhanced interface that simplifies use for both end users and administrators, potentially providing higher customer satisfaction and reduced friction during login and account management processes.
  • Sales strategy: RSA benefits from a sales strategy rooted in a strong partner ecosystem, cross-selling opportunities and multichannel support.
  • Vertical strategy: RSA has extensive experience serving highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, government and critical infrastructure.
  • Market understanding: RSA demonstrates a strong understanding of the drivers and unique considerations for workforce AM use cases, but it is below-average for CIAM capabilities.

  Cons:

  • Business model: RSA should leverage its brand equity in regulated sectors, invest in vertical customization, and modernize its delivery to capture new growth opportunities.
  • Product: RSA's product capabilities are not as strong as most vendors in this research. Specifically, its capabilities are below-average for authorization and API access control, and very limited for portable and decentralized identity
  • Operations: RSA has recently realigned its go-to-market model, which could introduce transitional risks as new structures and leadership are established.
  • Marketing execution: RSA is primarily recognized for its authentication solutions; its overall brand awareness as an AM vendor covering all user constituencies is less than the other AM vendors included in this research.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Access Management, 11 November 2025, ID G00826010

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