Opal.dev vs. PingOne from Ping Identity

I am frustrated that my organization chose to adopt Opal for our access management tool. It is extremely difficult to use, due to bugs and basic functionality missing. Engineers are not given write access to production resources, so every change must flow through Opal.

This involves writing an IAM policy by hand for every request, because it is far too difficult to find an existing role in the system, and requests must the narrowly tailored only to allow the exact operation requested. Opal makes this process much more difficult because it lacks basic functionality for end users, such as: -Ability to modify an existing IAM role

-Ability to view existing IAM roles

-Ability to delete duplicate Opal roles

-Lack of IAM role templates

-Poor error messages when attempting JSON policy fails validation

In general, each Opal request takes 5-10 minutes because you need to be very explicit with every API action you are requesting, which then needs to be repeated multiple times because it is very hard to get everything correct the first time, which then requires a new round of reviews. This is partially because AWS IAM roles can be tricky to get right, but Opal provides no functionality to make this easier.

Incentivized

The products we're using work well and are reliable. We've had very few outages, and when we have, their support team has been highly responsive and addressed the issues quickly. They are very customer focused and have been great partners throughout the relationship. I'm looking to adopt more of their technologies over the coming year.

• It is very simple to onboard the application
• It provide lot of flexibility with SSO functions
• It helped reducing the cost.

Incentivized

• Inability to modify an IAM role after creation
• Inability to use templated IAM roles
• Inability to see existing IAM roles
• Inability for users to clean up existing Opal roles
• Poor ability to search for existing Opal roles
• Repeated reliability issues - IAM role creation breaks far too often
• Cryptic error messages when IAM JSON is incorrect

Incentivized

• There are times that the response time is quite slow.
• Since this is built on Google Cloud, there are moments when we encounter errors when logging in or looping in Google.
• UI could be improved.

Incentivized

Easy to use; all UI's are user friendly and easy to learn.[The] possibility to use API is [a] big value as well. We really like integration with CyberArk; with it we can manage privileged accounts according to company standards without breaking any rules, and we can be 100% sure that only approved persons will have administrative access.

Ping's support is willing and attentive, but if I am in a position to engage them I am often at a point where most of the usual support engineers would not be in a position to answer the questions I have. However, Ping has been more than willing to engage their product and development teams with our organization as we take advanced deployment and use case challenges to them.

Incentivized

We tested PingOne but our security team was not happy with it (because of cloud exposure). We tested PingId as well but our security team was not happy with it (because of cloud exposure). We [spent] some time on PingDataGovernance but so far we don't have any use case for this product. We started exploration for PingDataSync (to synchronize two different LDAP directories), [and] so far it looks promising.

• Decreased engineering productivity

Incentivized

• Flexibility is key, we can integrate with any solution.
• Single control plane for all authentication.
• A single provider for all authentication needs simplifies the stack and solution, and therefore the maintenance experience for users.

Incentivized