Microsoft Entra ID Review
May 05, 2025
Microsoft Entra ID Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Entra ID
We use Entra ID primarily to drive what I'm calling smarter authentication. So through OAuth, Entra ID makes it really, really easy to set up this concept of on behalf of. You have an application out there in the cloud somewhere and the user logs into the application and then the app needs to do something, maybe send an email or whatever. And so that app needs to go talk to someone else. Now how do we make sure that it's actually you are the person requesting that the app does this? I'm not going to go into the technicals there, but effectively Entra ID makes it easy to do that and deeper things. So an app talks to an app, talks to an app that does a thing, it's still you and it makes that sort of authentication really easy to set up and manage and bring it home to the reality.
Pros
- The documentation is really good. Service reliability is incredible and sort of the way that you've made it applicable to expose APIs across multiple, it's a good management suite. It's easy to use, it's easy to understand.
Cons
- I would say that, and I'm going to just be blunt here, your team's really, really hard to work with. Submitting product feedback is mostly a fight. It doesn't, regardless of how big or small the company is that I'm representing, it is always an unpleasant experience to work with the active director team or the Entra ID team. Now I want to qualify that a little bit. This is a service that shouldn't move fast. It's the core of most of our companies. If we lose the directory, we lose the business. So I understand that a little bit.
- But I wanted to talk about a challenge that we faced for a really long time. In Entra ID, we're going to a little technical here, you can create these things called service principles. Service principles are effectively non-human accounts. So you're a human, I'm a human, but that coffee machine, if it needed to send an email, it would get a non-human account. And non-human accounts don't have username and passwords, they have keys that you use to sign in. So long story short, these service account keys are what you use to log in. Now you can issue multiples of these. There was no way to revoke them for a really long time. We would have to disable the account and we couldn't see which key was used. There was a bunch of difficulty there and all of our feedback really came back as later. And so one of the biggest challenges with Entra ID for us, and we're a large company, we're a very large company, we represent most of the Fortune 500 as a consultancy, is that the feedback just felt, it felt black box felt disconnected from some of these things. So out of all the cons of Entra ID, this isn't a feature that is software, but it is the most difficult part. And honestly, as an enterprise customer, it's the most important feature.
- I would say that it's so multifaceted that certain parts of it, like that OAuth thing that we were talking about has made a huge ROI. But another example, enter private access is insanely expensive. Insanely expensive, so it's tough. That's a tough one. Entra is just such a broad product family. It'd be like asking how does Microsoft affect your business? How long you got? That's way more than five minutes. But I would say that especially given that there's not a lot of competition, it's tough to really quantify that. I'd say a better way to say that is that compared to Active Directory, the original active directory, the way that the management of the Entra product suite has been going is more forward thinking. Again, it's a new product. You don't have 35 years of directories to support, so freebie there, but I would say that Entra ID feels really forward thinking, which allows us to bet on it and then when we bet on the future and win our business is good.
I cannot because, so as a consultant, I'm kind of just guessing at which project you're talking about here, but in terms of our company's perspective, in the consulting arm, we are not part of the central IT arm. But I will tell you we're a global company. I think we touch 150 countries, and a lot of those countries have independent firms that are then member firms. So there's multiple directories, synchronized, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is insanely complex. And so we have every type of identity you can even imagine. We have some of those.
Yes, I don't know. I don't have the deployment details of this, but we use Entra ID for everything.
Yes. Our time sheet and SAP systems are connected to Entra ID
Can't really answer that question. Yes, every single day it's a cloud service, but yeah, but not a bad way. It just is changing.
I'd love to tell you about Amazon IM and Google's IM because they suck and they tell you to use Entra ID, factually. They're like, oh cool, set it up with Entra ID. They just know you're going to do it. I don't think you guys have a competitor, to be honest. You just don't.
Do you think Microsoft Entra ID delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Microsoft Entra ID's feature set?
Yes
Did Microsoft Entra ID live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Microsoft Entra ID go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Microsoft Entra ID again?
Yes
Microsoft Entra ID Feature Ratings
Using Microsoft Entra ID
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
None | None |
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