ForgeRock vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ForgeRock and Symantec Siteminder based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Access Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed ForgeRock vs. Symantec Siteminder Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Easy to customize and adaptable to any environment.""The solution integrates well and it is important for them to keep up with the current trends in the market quickly enough, and they have been doing a good job at it.""We have found the identity and access management tools in the solution to be particularly useful for our organization.""Even though we have very small business interests with them today, they see that we plan on growing drastically over the next two years. Therefore, we have excellent support and we are now at a point where we are not calling tech support. We pick up a phone and call the Account Manager and they'll get everything resolved for us. We don't have to queue along with everybody else and go through a long process.""The support is good and prompt.""ForgeRock has CIAM, which other products didn't have, and they have DevOps ready.""I like the intelligent authentication feature.""The solution's most valuable feature is the authentication for the consumers. The integration with other third-party applications is excellent."

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"All of our applications get a point, click, and you are in, while we increase security at the same time.""A valuable feature of Siteminder is the way it handles bulk traffic. The features it has, in terms of routing the traffic and load balancing, are good.""The most valuable feature is the Federation part of Single Sign On, which is customizable and is easily integrated with any customer application or any third party application.""As our identity model continues to mature, probably the Federation is most valueable.""IWA is an out-of-the-box feature. The SAML-based federation is standard for all tools. However, CA Single Sign-On has made the federation configuration way too simple and handy to set up and use.""The most valuable feature is that it meets the requirements of the customer. You have a lot of features in the product. Every product has them, but the question is, are these products going to meet the requirement of the customer?""Authentication & Authorization are important because all the sites need authentication for security purposes. That has been handled pretty well all these years with SSO.""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."

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Cons
"Lacks simplified documentation within the tool that requires use of a separate portal.""The solution could improve by adding more advertising and marketing.""They should improve the solution by include reporting.""The solution's deployment should be made easier.""ForgeRock is an open source solution and is available to everyone but it is not freeware. If you need support, you need a subscription for ForgeRock. Many of its functionalities need to be built up with the help of a consultant.""We raised tickets asking for improvements, but sometimes we don't get the proper solution. They are responding, but the ticket is open for weeks and weeks. For some issues, we don't get a satisfactory solution or the solution doesn't work.""It should be a little bit easier to implement. It is user-friendly, but there is always scope for improvement.""In an upcoming release, the solution could improve by limiting the need to do customizations."

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"Better documentation. I went through some sessions on single sign-on for version 12.7.""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.""An area Siteminder could improve on is that there are a few limitations, in terms of new protocols for OpenID. If I want to have different scopes, the features are limited. They also do not have APIs exposed, which is a major drawback. API is a feature I would like to see included in the next release.""To add more value to this solution it needs to be more user-friendly.""We are finding some compatibility issues. We're still working with CA on them.""As we are moving in to the mobility space, this is where we really see SiteMinder and their other product really come together to provide a solution base to a different area where the IoT is coming, the different business communications are happening. All of those things require authentication and we really want to see this product grow into that role."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It's a bit pricey and could be more competitive."
  • "We have multiple clients we are looking at right now. We are at a very small number, however, the idea and the goal is to grow. We are looking at about $100,000 and $50,000 a minimum a month cost. That'd be minimum maybe in a couple of years."
  • "Its price is comparable to other products in the market."
  • "Its licensing is on a yearly basis, but it also depends on the contract that you have with the vendor. They have multiple types of contracts. There are additional costs to the standard licensing fees. If you need some of the features, you have to pay more."
  • "The license is purchased annually per user. However, you can negotiate if you are signing for a longer period of time. When comparing this solution to others on the market it is priced fair, it is not at the top of the price range or at the bottom end."
  • "The pricing of the solution is fair but I do not have the full details."
  • "ForgeRock's pricing is more competitive than other products."
  • "ForgeRock is an expensive solution."
  • More ForgeRock Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
  • "I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
  • "CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
  • "Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
  • "The licensing is fair for this solution."
  • "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 pricing is reasonable."
  • More Symantec Siteminder Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of ForgeRock are social login and data protection.
    Top Answer:The solution's deployment should be made easier.
    Top Answer:It's agent-based. It's convenient to deploy and integrate.
    Top Answer:It doesn't have a feature for... or maybe it has, but for modern authentication, like OAuth or OIDC. We haven't utilized that portion; we haven't really looked at it because our priority is LDAP… more »
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 37 in Access Management
    Views
    3,141
    Comparisons
    2,106
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    481
    Rating
    8.4
    12th
    out of 37 in Access Management
    Views
    1,772
    Comparisons
    1,349
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    298
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    ForgeRock Identity Platform, ForgeRock OpenIDM
    Single Sign-On, SiteMinder, CA SSO, Layer7 SiteMinder
    Learn More
    Overview

    ForgeRock is a comprehensive open-source identity and access management solution designed to meet the unique needs of your users and workforce. With ForgeRock you can orchestrate, manage, and secure the complete lifecycle of identities in any cloud or hybrid environment. ForgeRock allows you to set up bot detection, identity proofing, and risk-based authentication.

    With ForgeRock, you can define access policies and automate the management of the identity lifecycle all from a central, easy to use, and graphical dashboard. ForgeRock Access Management allows you to build safe authentication using options like passwordless and usernameless logins, single sign-on, biometrics, contextual analytics, and behavioral authentication. When threats appear, you can swiftly change how your users access your most sensitive applications and provide users with secure access to the applications, systems, and resources they need on demand.

    ForgeRock Benefits and Key Features

    • Elevate your security and efficiency: Consolidating your legacy systems under one single platform provides reliable, unified control over all your user identities and access-related policies. ForgeRock Access Management also supports scaling existing policies for application onto new setups.

    • Passwordless authentication: Implementing passwordless authentication is simple with ForgeRock Access Management. You can easily replace user-selected passwords with other options, such as easy multi-factor authentication, biometrics, and SSO.

    • Identity governance: ForgeRock Identity Governance is a modern, AI-driven identity governance solution. By leveraging ForgeRock generated analysis reports, you can identify and apply appropriate user access, automate high-confidence access approvals, recommend certification for low-risk accounts, and review high-risk and inappropriate user access privileges. In addition, you can grant and enforce access to systems, applications, and infrastructure according to established policies.

    Reviews from Real Users

    ForgeRock stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust identity and access tools and its being easy to manage and scale with one central dashboard.

    PeerSpot users note the effectiveness of these features. A technology solutions leader at an outsourcing company writes, “We need it for multiple clients, multiple implementations. Not all of them are necessarily a multi-tenant solution. We need a very versatile solution that can do a lot of work, but from a single instance that we can centralize authentications and we don't duplicate the efforts and that's where ForgeRock seems to do better.”

    Mohamed B., a cyber security consultant at a tech company, writes, "Their access management solution, OpenAM, is most valuable because it meets the needs of a lot of users. ForgeRock secured our system so that it is accessed only by authorized people, and it implemented the SSO."

    Symantec® SiteMinder is designed to secure the modern enterprise through a unified access management platform that applies the appropriate authentication mechanism to positively identify users; provides single sign-on and identity federation for seamless access to any application; enforces granular security policies to stop unauthorized access to sensitive resources; and monitors and manages the entire user session to prevent session hijacking. Finally, Symantec SiteMinder is battle-tested and has been deployed in the largest IT environments in the world.

    Sample Customers
    Geico, Thomson Reuters, Salesforce, McKesson, Trinet, SKY, BNP Paribas, Deloitte, Capgemini, North Western University
    British Telecom, CoreBlox, DBS, HMS, Itera ASA and Simeo
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm27%
    Media Company9%
    Legal Firm9%
    Outsourcing Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm39%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Retailer7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm35%
    Insurance Company10%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise48%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise73%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business8%
    Midsize Enterprise4%
    Large Enterprise88%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise82%
    Buyer's Guide
    ForgeRock vs. Symantec Siteminder
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about ForgeRock vs. Symantec Siteminder and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    ForgeRock is ranked 4th in Access Management with 27 reviews while Symantec Siteminder is ranked 12th in Access Management with 69 reviews. ForgeRock is rated 8.0, while Symantec Siteminder is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of ForgeRock writes "Governance and access management solution used for multi-factor authentication that is outdated with an unresponsive UI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Siteminder writes "Easy to implement and customize and very stable". ForgeRock is most compared with SailPoint IdentityIQ, PingID, Microsoft Entra ID, Auth0 and Saviynt, whereas Symantec Siteminder is most compared with PingFederate, Okta Workforce Identity, PingAccess, PingID and Microsoft Entra ID. See our ForgeRock vs. Symantec Siteminder report.

    See our list of best Access Management vendors.

    We monitor all Access Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.