SailPoint is a leading force in the identity security landscape, with a complete range of solutions centered around Identity Governance and Administration (IGA).
What is SailPoint?
At its core, SailPoint is an Identity Governance and Administration platform designed to address the complex challenges organizations face in managing digital identities and ensuring appropriate access to resources.
Unlike solutions primarily focused on the authentication layer (like Single Sign-On or Multi-Factor Authentication), SailPoint's strength lies in providing visibility, control, and compliance over who has access to what information and applications across an increasingly heterogeneous IT environment.
This includes on-premises systems, cloud applications, databases, and even unstructured data.
SailPoint's platform helps companies answer critical questions such as:
- Who has access to which systems and data?
- Do users have excessive permissions?
- Is access provisioned and deprovisioned appropriately throughout the user lifecycle?
- Are we compliant with regulatory requirements regarding user access?
By automating and centralizing identity and access controls, SailPoint enables organizations to reduce risk, improve operational efficiency, and meet compliance mandates. It is particularly well-suited for large, complex enterprises with a significant number of applications, users, and stringent governance requirements.
Key Features of SailPoint
SailPoint's feature set is designed to provide a holistic approach to identity security and governance:
1. Identity Governance and Cloud Governence
This foundational capability involves defining, enforcing, and monitoring access policies across the organization.
With the increasing adoption of cloud services, SailPoint has extended its governance capabilities to cloud environments, helping organizations manage access to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS applications.
2. Access Certifications (or Access Reviews)
Automating the process of periodically reviewing and approving or revoking user access rights to ensure they are still necessary and appropriate. This is a critical function for compliance and risk reduction.
3. Policy Management and Segregation of Duties (SoD)
Creating and managing fine-grained access policies based on roles, attributes, and context. SailPoint allows for the definition of preventive and detective policies to enforce controls and identify violations.
Defining and enforcing rules to prevent users from having conflicting combinations of access rights that could enable fraudulent activities or errors. SailPoint can identify SoD violations and trigger remediation workflows.
4. Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM) With Automated Provisioning and Deprovisioning
SailPoint automates the technical process of creating, updating, and deleting user accounts and entitlements across integrated applications and systems. This reduces manual tasks, improves efficiency, and ensures consistency.
SailPoint automates the key stages of an identity's journey within the organization:
- Joiner Process: Automating the provisioning of necessary accounts and access rights for new employees based on their role and department.
- Mover Process: Managing access changes when employees move to different roles or departments, ensuring they gain the necessary new access and lose access that is no longer relevant.
- Leaver Process: Automating the deprovisioning of all accounts and access rights when employees leave the organization, minimizing the risk of orphaned accounts and unauthorized access.
5. Access Request Management
Providing a self-service portal where users can request access to applications and resources. These requests are routed through automated approval workflows based on defined policies and organizational structures, ensuring appropriate oversight.
6. PAM and Role Management
Enabling organizations to define and manage roles that represent collections of access rights based on job functions or responsibilities. This simplifies access management by assigning users to roles rather than managing individual entitlements.
SailPoint can integrate with PAM solutions to provide a more complete picture of privileged accounts and their access rights within the overall identity governance framework.
7. Analytics and Reporting
SailPoint offers robust reporting and analytics capabilities to provide insights into identity and access data. This includes:
- Compliance Reports: Generating reports to demonstrate compliance with regulations and internal policies.
- Risk Scores: Assigning risk scores to identities and access rights based on factors like entitlements, behavior, and policy violations.
- Audit Trails: Maintaining detailed logs of all identity-related activities, including access requests, approvals, and provisioning events, for auditing purposes.
8. Application Integration and File Management
SailPoint's strength is its ability to integrate with a wide variety of enterprise applications, directories, databases, and cloud services. This is achieved through a comprehensive library of connectors and APIs, allowing organizations to bring identity and access data from disparate sources into the SailPoint platform for centralized governance.
SailPoint provides visibility and governance over user access to unstructured data residing in file shares and collaboration platforms.
9. SailPoint Usability and Interface
The usability and interface of SailPoint receive mixed feedback in reviews, often reflecting the inherent complexity of a powerful enterprise-grade IGA platform.
- Administrative Experience: The administrative console is feature-rich and provides extensive control over the platform's configuration and management. However, some administrators find it complex and challenging to navigate, especially when initially learning the system or managing a large and complex environment. The depth of functionality means there is a significant learning curve to master the platform's capabilities effectively.
- End-User Experience: The end-user interface for common tasks like requesting access or performing access reviews is generally considered functional. SailPoint has put effort into making these processes more intuitive, but the actual user experience can vary depending on how well the platform is configured and customized by the implementing organization. Some reviews suggest that while basic tasks are straightforward, more complex interactions might require some guidance.
- Implementation Usability: The implementation process itself is frequently described as complex and requiring specialized skills. This impacts the initial "usability" from the perspective of the implementation team and can influence the time and resources required to get the platform up and running effectively.
- Workflow and Customization: A key aspect of SailPoint's power is its flexible workflow engine and extensive customization options. While this allows organizations to tailor the platform to their specific business processes, it also adds to the complexity of configuration and ongoing management.
- Documentation and Training: The availability and clarity of documentation and training resources are important factors influencing usability. Reviews sometimes mention challenges in finding comprehensive documentation or the need for significant training to effectively use the platform.
Despite some of the perceived complexities, many users appreciate the power and flexibility that the interface provides, allowing them to manage intricate identity and access scenarios.
The ability to customize the platform to fit specific organizational needs is seen as a significant advantage, even if it requires a higher level of technical expertise.
SailPoint Pricing
SailPoint's pricing model is designed for the enterprise market and is generally considered to be at the higher end of the spectrum for IGA solutions. The Capterra document specifies a starting price of $75,000.00, confirming it represents a significant investment for organizations. It also explicitly states that SailPoint does not offer a free version. The total cost is influenced by several factors.
Key aspects of SailPoint pricing include:
- Identity Count: The primary driver of licensing costs is typically the number of identities being managed within the platform.
- Modules and Features: The specific SailPoint modules and features licensed significantly impact the overall cost. Organizations can choose the components that align with their specific needs, but adding more capabilities increases the price.
- Deployment Model: The deployment model chosen influences pricing and associated costs. SailPoint can be deployed cloud-based or on-premise.
- Contract Length: Like many enterprise software agreements, the length of the contract can impact pricing, with longer commitments potentially offering some cost advantages.
- Implementation and Professional Services: Beyond the software license, there are substantial costs associated with the initial implementation. This often requires engaging SailPoint's professional services or those of a certified partner, which can be a significant expenditure due to the complexity of deployment, integration, and potentially steep learning curve noted by users.
- Ongoing Maintenance and Support: Annual maintenance and support fees are a recurring cost that organizations must factor into their budget.
- Customization and Integration: Complex integrations or extensive customization of workflows and policies can add to the overall cost of ownership, a factor also mentioned in user reviews regarding the need for considerable customization.
While the initial investment in SailPoint is considerable, the return on investment is often realized through reduced risk of data breaches and compliance fines, increased efficiency from automating manual processes, and improved security posture.
However, organizations, especially smaller ones or those with budget constraints, should carefully evaluate the total cost of ownership and compare it against the potential benefits and alternative solutions. Reviewers often highlight the expense as a major consideration when evaluating SailPoint.
SailPoint Reviews and Ratings
Across various review platforms, SailPoint consistently garners high ratings in the Identity Governance and Administration category, reinforcing its position as a market leader.
- Overall Ratings: SailPoint typically receives strong overall ratings, often in the range of 4.0 to 4.7 out of 5 on platforms like Gartner Peer Insights, PeerSpot, and GetApp. These ratings reflect overall customer satisfaction with the platform's capabilities and performance.
- Feature Ratings: Users generally rate SailPoint's core IGA features, such as access certifications, policy management, and identity lifecycle management, very positively, highlighting their effectiveness in addressing governance requirements.
- Ease of Use and Implementation Ratings: Ratings for ease of use and implementation are often lower compared to feature ratings, aligning with the feedback about the platform's complexity. However, these ratings can vary depending on the specific product version (e.g., IdentityIQ vs. Identity Security Cloud) and the user's role and experience level.
- Support Ratings: Ratings for customer support show some variability, with both positive and negative feedback reported. This suggests that the quality of the support experience can differ among users.
- Likelihood to Recommend: Despite the complexity and cost, a high percentage of users on platforms like PeerSpot and SoftwareReviews indicate that they are likely to recommend SailPoint to others facing similar identity governance challenges, underscoring the value they derive from the platform.
Infisign: The Best SailPoint Alternative
When comparing SailPoint alternatives, organizations typically consider factors such as the depth of IGA features required, the complexity of their IT environment, the need for integrations with specific applications, budget constraints, implementation resources, and the desired user experience.
Which is why Infisign is such an ideal choice to work with for anyone looking for an Okta alternative. Well aside from the fact that it comes with an astounding 6000+ API + SDK integrations, this software comes with some of the listed features that make it an ideal choice for enterprises.
Also it has two main solutions Infisign’s IAM Suite for enterprises of any size and UniFed with is a customer identity management software that speeds-up your GTM.
- Transparent Pricing: Infisign comes with tenant based pricing that avoids additional costs for necessary authentication features. Unlike other access management software on the market there are no hidden costs that come along with usage of additional features or needing to sync additional tools to your user base.
- Easy to Navigate User Interface: IAM software can get complex, however, Infisign is intuitive and easy to navigate given it’s simple and logical layout. Aside from this, you can add software to you’re framework quickly given it’s pre-built integrations.
- Single Sign On: Infisign’s Single-Sign On or SSO Improves user convenience by reducing password fatigue with users only needing to login once every few hours. With Infisign you can set up SSO acros your techstack in under 4 hours.
- Works on Web Based and Legacy Ecosystems: Infisign allows compatibility and integration capabilities for both modern web applications and older, traditional IT systems with its managed password authentication features that allow users to secure both legacy and web-based applications passwordless with one login.
- Adaptive MFA WIth Conditional Access: MFA is actually a fool-proof from of security but it can get annoying. With adaptive MFA you get both security and convenience. Use biometrics, OTPS, QR codes,, Device passkeys or even magic links to login passwordless. Pair this with conditional access and you have strict protocols that prevent any suspicious access.
- AI Access Assist: Add and remove users under a minute using chatbots, Slack and Teams that allows you to grant and remove access quickly while on the go.
- Attribute Based Access Control: With attribute based access control you can add and remove hundreds of users to your techstack in one go based on roles, departments or any criteria you deem. Think of this RBAC that goes a step further.
- Network Access Gateway: WIth NAG or Network Acces Gateway you allow cloud based access and access control to on-remisis application using encrypted network gateways.
Want to know more about Infisign? Schedule a free demo call today!
FAQs about SailPoint
What is the primary difference between SailPoint and an identity provider like Okta?
SailPoint focuses on Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), managing and governing user access rights and ensuring compliance. Identity providers like Okta focus on Identity and Access Management (IAM), primarily handling user authentication (SSO, MFA) and initial access provisioning. SailPoint and identity providers often work together, with the identity provider handling authentication and initial access, and SailPoint providing the governance layer over what users can access.
Is SailPoint suitable for small businesses?
SailPoint is generally designed and priced for large enterprises with complex identity governance needs. Its cost and complexity typically make it less suitable or cost-effective for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
What is the typical implementation time for SailPoint?
Implementation timelines for SailPoint can vary significantly depending on the size and complexity of the organization's IT environment, the number of applications to be integrated, and the scope of the deployment. It can range from several months to over a year for large and complex implementations.
What kind of support does SailPoint offer?
SailPoint offers various levels of customer support, including technical support, access to documentation and knowledge bases, community forums, and professional services for implementation and optimization.
