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A feature-by-feature comparison of Akku IAM and Microsoft Entra for Indian mid-market enterprises — covering implementation, compliance, pricing, and support.
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Where Akku leads
Where Microsoft Entra leads
Feature-by-feature comparison
Akku IAM vs Microsoft Entra — complete overview
| Feature |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation Complexity | Employs microservices architecture for easy integration, customization and maintenance without business interruption. Provides a dedicated dashboard for Managed Services Providers (MSPs) to manage customers and their respective users, with user behavior analytics and metrics on authentication, authorization, and details on what applications are accessed by which user. Facilitates tenant and user creation with a step-by-step wizard requiring minimal to no training. Provides easily customizable mail notification templates. Offers cost-effective implementation plans. | Comes with complex, expensive, and time-consuming implementation and a lock-in to Microsoft products and technologies, resulting in high TCO. |
| Documentation & Support | Ensures cost-effective 24x7 support and provides detailed documentation. | Provides extensive documentation, training, and dedicated support, but support plans are expensive. |
| Infrastructure Deployment | Deployed on a highly secure environment utilizing Kubernetes clusters and an Istio service mesh to ensure all traffic flows through a secure tunnel. Includes robust backup and failover mechanisms for deployed cloud resources, along with a monitoring system that continuously tracks each cloud resource. Sends immediate notifications to the DevOps team in the event of an incident for rapid resolution, ensuring high application availability. | Provides cloud-based deployment integrated seamlessly with Azure services, but comes with a lock-in with Microsoft. |
| Infrastructure Costs and Management | Manages all client instances through a K8s cluster environment allowing for ‘true' multi-tenant architecture that optimizes cost and facilitates efficient management of all the instances. | Comes with a complex pricing structure involving multiple Microsoft products. |
| Nested Multi-Tenancy | Allows for multiple levels of sub-tenants within each tenant along with their own administration console | Provides multi-tenant identity management capabilities, but does not support nested multi-tenancy natively. |
| Authenticate with existing Directory | Allows for authentication to the IAM platform using the organizations's existing directory service. | Allows for authentication only with Microsoft AD and Azure AD. |
| Identity broker | Enables you to integrate with and leverage any existing identity provider in the organization. | Not available. |
| LDAP & AD Integration | Provides readily available connectors for AD and LDAP, and can be connected through Akku's wizard. | Supports only Microsoft AD and Azure AD. |
| SAML Authentication | Provides a customized UX to facilitate easy configuration with no specific domain expertise required. | Supports SAML authentication for single sign-on across multiple applications. |
| OpenID | Provides a customized UX to facilitate easy configuration with no specific domain expertise required | Supports OpenID-based authentication for secure access. |
| OAuth2 | Provides a customized UX to facilitate easy configuration with no specific domain expertise required. | Offers OAuth2 authentication with built-in security policies. |
| SSO | Provides plug-and-play SSO with white-label options. | Provides SSO, but white-label option is not available. |
| Single Logout | Enables single logout functionality, ensuring that when a user logs out of Akku, all integrated applications are automatically logged out. | Supports single logout for SAML and OpenID Connect-based authentication. |
| Desktop SSO | Allows users to log in from their Windows laptop or desktop and seamlessly access configured service provider applications without requiring additional authentication. | Requires purchase and implementation of Microsoft AD and Azure AD. |
| SSO with Credential Replay | Allows for SSO to legacy apps that do not support federated authentication using Credential Replay | Available. |
| Configurable SSO App Dashboard | Allows the user to configure their SSO dashboard to add, remove, display or hide the listed apps. | Not available. |
| Configurable / Auto App Arrangement in Dashboard | Allows users to arrange apps in the SSO dashboard into folders, ordered by most frequently used, alphabetically or based on user preference. | Not available. |
| Preferred Browser SSO | Allows the administrator or user to select the preferred browser on which each SSO application launches, based on which browser each app works best on. | Not available. |
| Auto Launch SSO Apps | Allows the administrator or user to select apps that have to be launched with SSO automatically when the machine starts. This requires Desktop SSO to be implemented. | Not available. |
| MFA | Provides multi-factor authentication (MFA) and adaptive MFA (AMFA) with a range of factors including push notification, face/touch, Google Authenticator and OTP based authentication. | Provides a robust MFA solution with conditional access policies, supporting app-based, SMS, and biometric authentication |
| Password Policy | Enables comprehensive password policy management, including length, complexity, expiration, and prevention of reuse. | Enables comprehensive password policy management, including length, complexity, expiration, and banned password lists. |
| Configurable Auto Account Unlock | Enables locked user accounts to be automatically unlocked within a specified duration | Provides configurable account lockout policies with auto-unlock settings to prevent brute-force attacks. |
| Mobile Password Management | Allows users to manage their passwords using their mobile devices. | Enables mobile password reset and self-service password management through the Microsoft Authenticator app. |
| Locked Out User Password Reset & Account Unlock | Allows locked out users to unlock their accounts or reset their passwords. | Provides self-service password reset with identity verification methods, allowing users to reset their passwords and unlock accounts. |
| Password Sync | Allows synchronization of users' passwords from the directory to all their apps that require credential replay for SSO. | Provides password synchronization between on-premises Active Directory and cloud applications through Azure AD Connect. |
| Roaming User Password Management | Allows for the password in the machine cache to be updated upon change or reset of password from outside the directory domain network. | Provides password writeback capabilities, allowing roaming users to sync their updated credentials across devices outside the corporate network. |
| IP-based Restriction | Enables allowing access to applications only from authorized IPs through a simple configuration process. | Provides this functionality through conditional access policies. |
| Location-based Restriction | Provides a facility to restrict access to users from a particular location. | Provides this functionality through conditional access policies. |
| Device-based Restriction | Provides a dedicated access manager that enables allowing access only from authorized devices, and also allows integration with third party applications. | Provides this functionality through conditional access policies. |
| MDM | Enables authorization, blocking, and revocation of access on individual devices including enforcing passcodes and remote data wipe. | Available. |
| Provisioning / Deprovisioning of Applications | Provides application provisioning based on Akku's role-based access control (RBAC) as part of user onboarding, with single click deprovisioning across all applications. Provisioning is achieved through a dedicated provisioning engine with dedicated connectors to each target application. | Provides extensive and in-depth provisioning and deprovisioning features, but is highly dependent on Microsoft AD or Azure AD and other Microsoft products. |
| Subscription & User Management of Third-party Apps | Provides this functionality, with SAML 2.0 integration already done with 100+ SaaS applications. | Provides subscription and user management features for integrated applications. |
| Reports | Provides detailed audit logs for tracking all events related to access and session usage, enabling reports to be generated for specific time periods and for specific users and the applications they access. Also allows Build Your Own Reports at each tenant level. | Provides advanced security monitoring and reporting with built-in compliance tracking, but requires purchase of other Microsoft products for proper reporting. |
| SaaS Application Usage Analytics | Provides daily monitoring of user activity track effective usage. Provides usage statistics to the tenant administrator, enabling informed decisions on deprovisioning users who are not actively utilizing integrated applications, which directly relates to effective utilization and cost management of SaaS applications. | Requires the purchase of other Microsoft products. |
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