Microsoft Entra External ID vs. Univention Corporate Server (UCS)

It is not easy to calculate the actual ROI due to the difficult quantification of all factors, but it certainly contributed a lot in protecting, monitoring and controlling access to our system. It also made it much easier to detect vulnerable external users with simple and "easy to hack" passwords they use on multiple apps.

Univention Corporate Server is well suited:

1. If an Organization would like to use it as a complete Active Directory Server.
2. If an Organization wants to deploy other applications which are important like SSO, Mail Server, 2FA etc., as with one click all these Apps will be integrated magically thus reducing the Admin job considerably.
3. Web based management which will be quite useful for the Admins who are from Windows background only.
4. Univention as a company which has close to 2 decades of experience.

• Single sign-on simplifies access to your apps from anywhere
• Strong authentication for your customers using their preferred identity provider.
• Integrating with social accounts such as Facebook or Google+

Incentivized

• Complete replacement for MS Active Directory Server.
• Univention App Center - awesome concept with which Apps can be installed for the Domain.
• App Center can be compared to Google Play Store or Apple Play Store - Organizations can gain tremendous advantages.
• Plethora of Apps which are both free and paid and excellent apps for the Organizations.

• Troubleshooting diagnostic logs effectively requires VS Code
• Group and role management requires additional effort
• The programming model (XML) could use some developer experience love

Incentivized

• As Univention is from Germany, lot of informative articles are in German but English articles are also good but less in number.

Each one of these alternatives has pros and cons. PingOne from Ping Identity states they "help deliver the secure and seamless customer experience to win battles for customer acquisition, retention, revenue, loyalty, and trust." While that may be the case, they did not fit our needs. We have a complex system and it did not seem to fit into our business.

Incentivized

We have evaluated Zentyal and ClearOS but we found out that UCS is more suited to every Organization.

• Having monthly active users billing was cost-effective.
• Helped with the IT support that was already managing the Azure platform of the company; this helped to manage the costs better and optimize them.

Incentivized

• As a partner, we have gained lot of respect from our customers as UCS is rock solid.
• UCS is truly Open Source.
• UCS has surpassed our expectations.