BetterCloud vs. Okta

BetterCloud is well suited for small to medium sized companies where a small technology support team can exponentially improve their capacity thru the available automation. When a company's data set starts to grow larger than 50-60 million objects and ~30k+ users there is still a good return on the investment but the population that BetterCloud has catered to for so long does not seem to be plentiful and shared experiences and community are just not there. Where a company that size might have a handful of technically capable team members that push for functionality that doesn't seem niche, there isn't much of a crowd to bounce those large scale ideas off of.

Incentivized

It has extensive compatibility and rich feature set of integrating with a wide array of core systems and SaaS platforms. Daily I utilize Okta's user-friendly central hub to simplify access the numerous applications we utilize within my company (Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, among many others.)

Incentivized

• Allows us to quickly audit and assign delegates to email account, something that's completely missing in Google as an administrative function
• Allows us to automate offboarding of a Google account
• Allows us to perform bulk actions, like assigning email signatures and forwarding to hundreds of accounts at a time
• Allows us to audit Google Drive files. Orphaned files are very common in Google Workspace, and BetterCloud allows us to find them and take ownership of them.

Incentivized

• Centralized control of enterprise passwords
• Extensive customization of acceptable password criteria
• One system for Identity and Access Management to learn
• Scalable throughout the university for all central services
• Uniform login experience for students, faculty, and staff
• Single point of response to address termination of access
• Ability to use FastPass for lower priority systems
• Excellent support of multi-factor requirements

Incentivized

• Integration with Google in the App version to allow pushing of email signatures, this feature is available in the legacy version.
• More canned reports, although custom reports are available for you to build yourself.
• More onsite visits with customers if available, to be onsite and see what challenges are available first hand.

Incentivized

• I'm not sure it's really a room for improvement thing, but due to the granularity offered by Okta, sometimes it can be challenging to find exactly what you're looking for.
• There was an instance in which we had issues getting SAML configured for an application. I feel this challenge was mostly user error (on our part) because we didn't realize the SAML instructions were SPECIFIC to each app integration and changed (codes) each time. We attempted to mirror the settings/configurations of an existing app (same app, but different domain). I think having a note somewhere that indicated that the instructions were unique to each integration would have saved us a bit of time. Again, I'm not sure this is really an issue with Okta though, more of a user learning curve thing.
• Sometimes searching for things is a challenge (without the "Rockstar" add-in). For example, if you have a user group called "Okta_users_everyone", searching for "everyone" will not find it. You have to search for the beginning of the object name (not just any part of it). The ability to search partial or wildcard would greatly enhance search functionality.

Incentivized

Okta has a passion to provide secure and scalable identity solution. Their passion has come across as advocacy in a way that has deepened my knowledge of the field of authentication. I took identity for granted before but after seeing features such as external authentication I know that Okta can enable my business to reach new heights

Some of its features are great and some are slightly complex and not easy without vendor support.

Incentivized

The Okta Identity Cloud advertises 4 9's of reliability and I would go as far to say that it may even do better than that. As a true Global organization that operates in just about every region of the world, we have yet to have an issue with The Okta Identity Cloud that has impacted our business operations.

Incentivized

From my perspective, for the things that my group uses it for, Okta is very fast. It is as least as fast as the local password database methods that it replaces on our campus enterprise services. I do not believe that it slows anything down at all. In fact, not having to think too much about the login, because they all look the same, probably speeds things up somewhat.

Incentivized

Support for BetterCloud is excellent. They have fantastic email support who are very responsive and knowledgeable, but more importantly they have chat support that are absolutely top-notch. They have not only the knowledge to answer and help, but the capability to solve without escalations or runarounds. These support folks are the real deal.

Incentivized

We've had a few support cases over the years and every case has been handled by the Okta support team beautifully. We received clear answers to questions we had regarding setup and even were provided simple to follow guides on how to setup their product to use with custom applications.

Incentivized

BetterCloud has a much more friendly UI when it comes to building workflows as I've mentioned before. Our team has visited Okta workflows a number of times but it was incredibly difficult to replicate our current BetterCloud workflows into Okta because the Okta UI for workflow building is hard to follow and create

Incentivized

With respective to user interface and license cost, we thought The Okta Identity Cloud was better than other tools for use. Their customization of license was another reason for us to go with The Okta Identity Cloud over other tools.

Incentivized

Being a cloud native application, The Okta Identity Cloud is extremely scalable and easy to setup. By integrating into existing directories and applications via standard techniques and protocols, it is very easy to both initially setup and add additional users as required. Once all the necessary integrations are setup, it's a simple rinse and repeat process to onboard additional users (which can be automated with imports as well)

Incentivized

• Data monitoring: previously unavailable insight into our organization’s file-sharing habits and documents.
• Granular roles: ability to set least-access permissions. And really, truly granular unlike some other applications.
• Automation: we’ve already saved dozens of man hours using workflows. Gives us time to focus on things that matter without compromising common tasks.

Incentivized

• Customer experience has been a big win for us. Extremely minimal issues reported.
• We did not have a PAM in place at all until The Okta Identity Cloud
• Relatively easy to deploy. No major downtimes to deploy was a nice bonus.