Microsoft Azure vs. Microsoft Entra ID

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft Azure
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
$29
per month
Microsoft Entra ID
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Microsoft Azure Active Directory or Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution supporting restricted access to applications with Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) built-in, single sign-on (SSO), B2B collaboration controls, self-service password, and integration with Microsoft productivity and cloud storage (Office 365, OneDrive, etc) as well as 3rd party services.
$6
per user/per month
Pricing
Microsoft AzureMicrosoft Entra ID
Editions & Modules
Developer
$29
per month
Standard
$100
per month
Professional Direct
$1000
per month
Basic
Free
per month
Premium P1
$6.00
per user/per month
Premium P2
$9.00
per user/per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft AzureMicrosoft Entra ID
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft AzureMicrosoft Entra ID
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Azure
Chose Microsoft Azure
Instead of above mentioned alternative we opted for Microsoft Azure because it is more powerful, reliable and pretty much a responsive environment.
Chose Microsoft Azure
Azure was less developed but with our relationship and familiarity with the tool, it beat out the competition. The service itself has some areas that need to be improved but the current features are very promising. Given another year or two, it'll be up there with AWS and other …
Chose Microsoft Azure
There are lots of players in this space these days, but Microsoft and AWS are the two most visible and easiest to get connected with. We were using AWS first, and have been using both for some time, but have now converted entirely over to Azure just for the ease of management, …
Microsoft Entra ID
Chose Microsoft Entra ID
I haven't used other products like Microsoft Entra ID.
Features
Microsoft AzureMicrosoft Entra ID
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Azure
8.5
27 Ratings
3% above category average
Microsoft Entra ID
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.126 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling8.725 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing8.624 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates8.225 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.326 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images8.424 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support9.026 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls8.626 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation8.224 Ratings00 Ratings
Identity Management
Comparison of Identity Management features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Azure
-
Ratings
Microsoft Entra ID
8.5
116 Ratings
3% above category average
ID-Management Access Control00 Ratings9.0114 Ratings
ID Management Single-Sign On (SSO)00 Ratings9.2114 Ratings
Multi-Factor Authentication00 Ratings9.1115 Ratings
Password Management00 Ratings8.0109 Ratings
Account Provisioning and De-provisioning00 Ratings8.4108 Ratings
ID Management Workflow Automation00 Ratings7.887 Ratings
ID Risk Management00 Ratings8.091 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Microsoft AzureMicrosoft Entra ID
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
1Password
1Password
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
OneLogin by One Identity
OneLogin by One Identity
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
OneLogin by One Identity
OneLogin by One Identity
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft AzureMicrosoft Entra ID
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(96 ratings)
8.9
(170 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(17 ratings)
9.7
(16 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(36 ratings)
8.8
(28 ratings)
Availability
6.8
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(27 ratings)
7.1
(21 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(2 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft AzureMicrosoft Entra ID
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
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Microsoft
That one is tough. It's just easy to integrate the sign-on portion with other products from other companies. Like BluePoint or Podint. It's very easy to integrate the user information with others. Using Android ID to register an application with other companies' applications.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
  • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
  • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
  • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
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Microsoft
  • The first thing is that it's a really good platform to make a whole inventory of your hardware and software that you already have in the organization. It's very simple. It's very easy to look at what you have in the whole organization. And after that, start applying, for instance, some policies, some solutions in terms of zero trust access using MFA as a second form of authentication. So, these are the ways we use the MTIV platform.
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Cons
Microsoft
  • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
  • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
  • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
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Microsoft
  • There is one thing that we lost since we migrated from Active Directory and it is the user expiration date. If I have an external that I know will work for six months, I have to manually check or put some kind of reminder. I cannot set an expiration date in Microsoft Entra ID. I still don't know why.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
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Microsoft
MSFT Entra ID has been essential for managing our geographically dispersed team. We're confident that it will scale with us as grow, and we'll be able to take advantage of additional security and ID management features as they become necessary. Being able to centrally manage our user access from anywhere with a small support team is such a relief.
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Usability
Microsoft
As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
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Microsoft
It's not complex. It works as configured, right? There's a lot of granular rules, and it'll get very specific if you need it to. But for many of our security capabilities, especially for mid-market enterprises, I think you can get all the capabilities you typically need with OnStar.
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Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
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Microsoft
There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe
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Performance
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
I could probably rate this a 10 but I'm always conservative on giving out perfect scored bt performance has not been a problem for us using Entra ID.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
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Microsoft
I have not needed to engage support for anything at this time. I have been able to find the answers either online or in a knowledgebase. I tried to skip the question but it would not let me, so I rated a 9 based on other interactions with Microsoft support I have had
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Online Training
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Most training was internally produced
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Implementation Rating
Microsoft
As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
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Microsoft
Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Entra ID is not as stand-alone product as competitors like Okta. It may lack some of the features that competing products have but on the other hand it integrates both technically and license wise with other Microsoft cloud services and is easy to deploy. It is also the easiest way to extend identity management to the cloud if you already have Microsoft Active Directory in use.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
The features are getting addresses per requirements and their value for Money. The proposed ROI and actual ROI build confidence.
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Scalability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.
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Professional Services
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Microsoft Professional Services' technical knowledge is appreciable as consultants design the solution as per customer requirements. Mapping of features per user specifications and assisting Customer IT engineers to implement so they can manage and administer the services.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
  • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
  • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
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Microsoft
  • Definitely, I can consider this one a positive because, as I mentioned earlier, it's a tool that can help our internal ID team track end users' activities in their sign-in logs and a lot of other things, which is really good and helpful for us.
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ScreenShots