ManageEngine ADManager Plus vs. Microsoft Defender for Identity

ManageEngine ADManager Plus is doing good in lot of areas and making things easy for admins that take care of Ad related works. It is helping us to create users in bulk rather than following one by one step in active directory. Apart from the user creation, we can modify users in bulk without going to one by one in their profile. We can manage user account from here like account update, some modification, password related issues, and mailbox update. This tool is good but it has some drawbacks like we have 2 domains in our company but we cannot edit or modify users for both domains in a single attempt. We cannot change in password settings for both domains in single selection.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Identity is a great solution for each company that has an Active Directory. It fills in the blanks for Identity related incidents that are being missed in the XDR platform. To get a full view on identity risks it is an essential component

• Bulk user creating/de-provisioning user, all bulk operations
• Reporting on many items, group membership, password expiration, etc.
• Works well with active directory and Google integration.
• Easy to use interface.
• Mobile app.

Incentivized

• detect threats and suspicious activities
• pro-active measurements on possible breaches
• identity security posture

• The standard version is useless for a larger company. Most have the Professional level to get the most out of the application but it is worth the cost.
• Needs better integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.

Incentivized

• setup can be complicated, with AD complexity
• Sometimes the load on DCs is pretty high, leading to performance issues
• Better tuning options for preventing false-positive/bening alerts

We are very satfisfied with the software and when time permits, we hope to explore additional features we are not using. It has a lot of we ae not currently using due to staffing shortages.

Incentivized

Without training, I have been able to create reports that I need and get the information I am looking for

Incentivized

Yes, it loads very quickly and moving between pages is very fast

Incentivized

Support for this software is not the greatest. If the software is not completely down, it can take up to a day to get a response back. However, once they do contact you they are friendly and helpful.

Incentivized

My company already owned ADManager when I started with them. If I remember correctly, it was chosen because it is a fairly cheap tool and because we also use Manage Engine's Service Desk Plus application. ADManager's main competitor (in my eyes) would be PowerShell, now that I have become more proficient with scripting it is rare that I use ADManager except to create users using one of the templates we created. The standardization you get with the templates is really great, it could also be done using an XML file and PowerShell, but why fix what isn't broken?

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Identity is more specialized on the Identity platform, it is a single solution compared to a multi-solution. The integration is better when using the XDR suite in combination with Sentinel. Microsoft Defender for Identity gives a better overview of the security posture

We are currently deploying on 1 department

Incentivized

They are able to demo the product and clearly explain use case scenario's and how to do things

Incentivized

• The software is licensed per tech, the pricing is pretty solid.
• Helpdesk tickets feel dramatically when we started using templates to create users
• Helps to keep the network secure by knowing which old user accounts to delete

Incentivized

• Cost impact was pretty high
• Learning curve, needed time (money) for training
• Greatly improved detections and gives more insights