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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Microsoft Entra ID

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft 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

    VMware ESXi

    Score7.4 out of 10
    N/AA bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.N/A
    Pricing
    Microsoft Entra IDVMware ESXi
    Editions & Modules
    Premium P1
    $6.00
    per user/per month
    Premium P2
    $9.00
    per user/per month
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Microsoft Entra IDVMware ESXi
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Microsoft Entra IDVMware ESXi
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    Chose VMware ESXi
    For me, it makes no sense to run Hyper-V on top of a server install. VMware ESXi seems to run smoother and more efficiently.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    227 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    93 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    99%
    Delivers good value for the price
    206 Answers
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    86 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    225 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    94 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    155 Answers
    99%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    183 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    91 Answers
    Features
    Microsoft Entra IDVMware ESXi
    Identity Management
    Comparison of Identity Management features of Microsoft Entra ID and VMware ESXi
    Feature
    Microsoft Entra ID
    8.6
    123 Ratings
    5% above category average
    VMware ESXi
    -
    Ratings
    ID-Management Access Control9.1122 Ratings00 Ratings
    ID Management Single-Sign On (SSO)9.5119 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multi-Factor Authentication9.2121 Ratings00 Ratings
    Password Management8.2113 Ratings00 Ratings
    Account Provisioning and De-provisioning8.5114 Ratings00 Ratings
    ID Management Workflow Automation8.290 Ratings00 Ratings
    ID Risk Management7.797 Ratings00 Ratings
    Server Virtualization
    Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Microsoft Entra ID and VMware ESXi
    Feature
    Microsoft Entra ID
    -
    Ratings
    VMware ESXi
    8.2
    128 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings8.0116 Ratings
    Management console00 Ratings9.0128 Ratings
    Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings8.0112 Ratings
    Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings8.0116 Ratings
    Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings8.0117 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Microsoft Entra IDVMware ESXi
    Small Businesses
    JumpCloud
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Proxmox VE
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    OneLogin by One Identity
    Score9.4 out of 10
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    Enterprises
    RSA Access Manager (Discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    IBM PowerVM
    Score9.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Microsoft Entra IDVMware ESXi
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.9
    (241 ratings)
    9.0
    (129 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.8
    (16 ratings)
    10.0
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (57 ratings)
    9.0
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.1
    (21 ratings)
    10.0
    (55 ratings)
    Online Training
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.7
    (3 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    7.4
    (2 ratings)
    5.1
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Professional Services
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Microsoft Entra IDVMware ESXi
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    Overall, the Microsoft Entra ID platform is best utilized by people looking to have one platform that manages all interactions between other platforms. The Microsoft Entra ID platform allows for a seemless SSO integration, and can also integrate with Intune for MDM. Additionally, and probably the most easy to understand integration, is the integration with Active Directory, and controls associated with that.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Application integration is really good for single sign-on and managing identity overall. The correlation with Active Directory on-prem is really good, so we can manage it in a single place. It's easy to manage the users and integrate other Microsoft products. It is the base of everything else.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    • Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others.
    • Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined.
    • VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Microsoft
    • I would like more risk policy suggestions. I guess that situation where we had outsourced employees in a country where somehow their location was changing too often, that we would have room to go, “Hey, this needs to be a lower risk.” Or maybe having easier options to let people log in when they're deemed high risk. It’s tricky because I feel like it’s really easy to do that wrong, but it’s the main area that I think could be improved. I guess also a little bit tighter administrative integration with other Microsoft products.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    • VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items.
    • VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi.
    • I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Microsoft
    From a user perspective, 10. From an admin perspective, 7 or 8. From the user perspective, it's very easy to use, but from the admin perspective, there's a lot of things that are not easily clear, testable, or verifiable without just trying a whole bunch of scenarios.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Microsoft
    There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    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.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    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
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    I can't say enough good about VMware's support team. To an individual they take ownership of the case, provide thorough answers, and follow up regularly. On one occasion, a problem we experienced with NSX Endpoint was escalated to development for a permanent resolution after a workaround was found. In my experience, most companies would have tried to find a way to close a case like that instead of taking it all the way. Most importantly, when production is down and every second counts, they VMware teams understand that urgency and treat your issue as if it were the only one they had to deal with. You can't ask for better.
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Microsoft
    Most training was internally produced
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    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.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    We've done stuff with Okta for Identity and Duo. Those would probably be the two big ones that I would say that people would recognize and stuff. There's some other smaller players we've talked to, but those are the two big ones that we play with. We're still using it. So, because it was integrated into everything we've already done, it just made it almost indispensable.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    As long as you're using Nutanix AOS on Nutanix hardware and are paying their software support fees, AOS is a valid competitor to VMware and can save money due to not needing a license and having their server management system built into the base host management system. If you aren't using Nutanix hardware, however, VMWare is in most cases the best way to go. I cannot comment on HyperV, but most IT people I know either use it because they have to (most) or they like it better (not many).
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Microsoft
    The features are getting addresses per requirements and their value for Money. The proposed ROI and actual ROI build confidence.
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    it has been fair and easy to understand. I know VMware is looking at wanting to change from CPU to core pricing so we will see what that looks like when it happens.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Microsoft
    Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    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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    VMware by Broadcom
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • We are doing a lot of sign-ins and working on it, and it worked quite well. We do have Microsoft support, so yes, we can handle all of the small issues we are sometimes having. But if you want to define it, I would say yes, we like it. Overall positive.
    Incentivized
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    VMware by Broadcom
    • VMWare ESXi licensing is affordable for our business - and the licensing model is simplistic. Not like that of Microsoft with having to keep track of server licenses and CAL licenses for users.
    • VMWare ESXi also has hardware-monitoring built-in, so that further saves us money from having to be spent with another vendor.
    • As much as I hate the saying "a single pane of glass" does fit for this product. You can manage your servers, monitor hardware status, create and export backup snapshots, manage virtual NICs, connect to various storage devices. We're very happy with this product.
    Incentivized
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