PAM platform evaluations go wrong in a predictable way. You build a feature matrix, every vendor ticks every box, and you end up choosing on price or on which sales team was most responsive. Six months later you discover the tool handles your Linux servers beautifully and has no idea who holds super-admin in your fifty SaaS applications.
The problem isn't the matrix. It's that feature checklists don't distinguish between vendors, because everyone has learned to answer yes. What distinguishes them is coverage, discovery and friction - and none of those show up as a checkbox.
This guide is about how to evaluate on the things that actually differ.
Worth answering honestly before you shortlist anything, because "PAM" gets applied to several different problems.
You probably need dedicated PAM if: you run significant on-premises or IaaS infrastructure with many administrators, you have compliance obligations that specifically require session recording, or you need to broker third-party vendor access to internal systems.
You might need something narrower if: your problem is mostly secrets in CI/CD pipelines - that's a secrets manager. Or mostly over-permissioned cloud IAM roles - that's closer to CIEM.
You might need something broader if: your privileged access is mostly SaaS super-admins rather than servers, and your actual question is who holds elevated access across the whole estate and whether it's justified. That's identity governance with privileged scope, and a traditional PAM vault won't answer it. Privileged access governance covers that distinction.
Plenty of organizations buy infrastructure PAM for a SaaS problem and are disappointed. Worth ten minutes of clarity up front.
The traditional category. Built around a credential vault, session brokering and recording for servers, databases and network devices. Deep, mature, strong compliance evidence, and generally the best answer if your privileged estate is largely infrastructure.
Trade-offs: typically the heaviest to deploy, often the most expensive once services are counted, and historically weakest on SaaS application admin accounts.
These are infrastructure-first PAM platforms, built primarily around securing privileged access to servers, databases, network devices and other critical infrastructure. Most combine credential vaulting, rotation, privileged session management and access controls. If most of your privileged access is infrastructure rather than SaaS applications, this is the category to shortlist from.
BeyondTrust – Password Safe + Privileged Remote Access
Credential management and password rotation paired with brokered remote access for employees and third-party users. BeyondTrust supports cloud and on-premises environments, while the combination of Password Safe and Privileged Remote Access is specifically designed to address both privileged account management and third-party access. Best fit: organisations where third-party and vendor access makes up a significant part of the privileged surface.
Idira (formerly CyberArk) – Privileged Access Manager Self-Hosted
The category archetype. Deep credential vaulting and privileged session management across Windows, Linux, databases and hybrid infrastructure. Best fit: large, complex infrastructure estates with strong session-recording, administrative-control and compliance-evidence requirements.
Delinea – Secret Server
An enterprise credential vault with automated discovery, password rotation and session monitoring, available in both cloud and on-premises deployments. Best fit: teams that want a vault-first PAM approach without committing to a single deployment model.
ManageEngine – PAM360
Consolidated privileged access management covering servers, applications and network devices, with credential vaulting, session management and privilege elevation. Best fit: mid-market and IT-led organisations looking for a broad PAM feature set, particularly where ManageEngine is already part of the management stack.
Netwrix – Privilege Secure
A more modern infrastructure-PAM approach built around just-in-time, task-based access and zero standing privilege rather than persistent administrative access. Best fit: organisations whose primary driver is eliminating standing privilege rather than simply managing it.
Also in this category: ARCON, WALLIX Bastion, One Identity Safeguard, senhasegura and Fudo Security.
IBM Verify Privileged Identity is powered by Delinea under an OEM agreement, so there is substantial product overlap and evaluating both may be redundant.
Oriented around machine credentials: API keys, tokens, certificates, secrets consumed by pipelines and applications. Excellent for DevOps-heavy environments where the privileged "users" are mostly services.
Trade-offs: human session management and recording are usually thinner. Often deployed alongside another tool rather than instead of one.
These are oriented around machine credentials -API keys, tokens, certificates and secrets consumed by applications and CI/CD pipelines. If your privileged "users" are mostly services rather than people, start here. These platforms often complement a human-focused PAM tool rather than replace one.
HashiCorp Vault (IBM)
The category benchmark for secrets management, covering dynamic secrets, encryption-as-a-service and certificate issuance. IBM completed its acquisition of HashiCorp in February 2025, and Vault Enterprise moved to IBM's support lifecycle with the 2.x release in 2026. Best fit: engineering-led organisations with multi-cloud infrastructure and a genuine appetite for operating it Vault rewards investment but is not low-effort.
Idira Secrets Manager (formerly CyberArk Conjur)
Idira's secrets-management line, with Conjur remaining available as an open-source edition alongside commercial SaaS and self-hosted offerings. It integrates with Idira's human-focused PAM products. Best fit: organisations already using CyberArk/Idira for privileged users that want machine secrets under the same vendor.
Akeyless
SaaS-first secrets management designed to avoid the operational overhead of running your own vault cluster. Best fit: teams that want Vault-style capability without owning the infrastructure underneath it.
Doppler
Developer-experience-led secrets management focused on making secrets easy to consume correctly across environments. Best fit: smaller engineering teams where adoption friction is the main obstacle to getting secrets out of .env files.
Cloud-native services - AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, Google Secret Manager
Each cloud's built-in option. Convenient, deeply integrated with that provider's IAM and readily available to teams already using the platform. Best fit: predominantly single-cloud organisations. The limitation is portability — managing secrets across multiple clouds through separate services can drive teams toward a neutral platform.
Also in this category: Delinea DevOps Secrets Vault and Infisical. 1Password also offers machine-credential capabilities through its developer tooling and Credential Broker. For certificate and broader machine-identity lifecycle management, the former Venafi portfolio - now part of Idira/Palo Alto Networks - is also a contender.
Focused on entitlements in cloud platforms - over-permissioned IAM roles, cross-account access, permission-to-usage gaps in AWS, Azure and GCP. Strong at showing what cloud identities can do versus what they actually do.
Trade-offs: limited or no coverage of on-premises infrastructure and SaaS applications. Answers a specific question very well.
Some are cloud PAM tools; others provide CIEM inside broader cloud-security platforms -
Britive
Cloud-native PAM with JIT and zero-standing-privilege access across major clouds. Best fit: teams prioritising cloud infrastructure access.
Sonrai Security
Cloud PAM and permissions management built around eliminating unused access and enforcing least privilege. Best fit: organisations tackling cloud entitlement sprawl.
Tenable CIEM / Tenable Cloud Security (formerly Ermetic)
CIEM within Tenable’s broader cloud-security portfolio. Best fit: existing Tenable customers consolidating cloud identity and security risk.
Palo Alto Networks — Cortex Cloud
CIEM and identity security within Palo Alto’s broader CNAPP platform, succeeding Prisma Cloud positioning. Best fit: organisations standardising on Palo Alto.
Wiz (Google Cloud)
Broad cloud-security platform with entitlement analysis as one capability. Google completed its $32bn acquisition in March 2026; Wiz remains multi-cloud. Best fit: buyers wanting CIEM as part of a wider cloud-security platform.
Microsoft: Entra Permissions Management was retired in November 2025. CIEM now sits within Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s Defender CSPM plan, with Delinea supporting migrations for former customers.
Privileged access as a capability within a broader identity governance platform, rather than a standalone vault. The advantage is that privileged and non-privileged access sit in one model — the same review, the same lifecycle, the same evidence.
Trade-offs: generally less depth on infrastructure session brokering than a dedicated vault. Better fit when your privileged estate is SaaS-and-cloud-weighted and your priority is governance rather than session forensics.
This is where Josys sits, and we'd rather be clear about that than pretend to be neutral. If you need certified session recording on legacy databases, a dedicated infrastructure vault will serve you better. If your problem is that you can't answer who holds admin across your SaaS estate and whether anyone approved it, that's the problem we're built for.
Every vendor says they support everything. Make them prove it against your actual inventory: Windows and Linux servers, cloud consoles, Kubernetes, databases by type, network devices, and - the one that gets skipped - SaaS application admin accounts. Ask for a demo against a system like yours, not the reference environment.
The single best question on a demo call: "How do you find privileged accounts I haven't told you about?"
If the answer is essentially "you import them," you keep every blind spot you started with - and the accounts you don't know about are the ones that matter. Push for specifics on how discovery works and what it can and can't see.
Time a real just-in-time elevation during evaluation. Not the demo script - an actual request through the actual approval flow.
If it takes fifteen minutes and two approvers, engineers will find a way around it, and you'll end up with shadow standing privilege that isn't in any inventory. Friction is a security property, not a UX detail. Least privilege access covers why this determines whether the control survives.
Bidirectional sync with Okta, Entra ID or Google Workspace, and how current it is. Nightly sync means a departed employee can retain privileged access for up to a day. Ask specifically about deprovisioning latency.
Ask to see a real evidence report, not a dashboard screenshot. The test: can you demonstrate that a specific control held over a specific period, without someone assembling it by hand? Dashboards impress buyers; reports satisfy auditors.
If the PAM platform is unavailable, can you still reach production? Every vendor has an answer. Fewer have one you can test. Ask them to walk through the failure mode, and ask what happens if their SaaS control plane is down.
Understand the exit before you sign. If credentials are vaulted in a proprietary store, how do you get them out? What's the migration path? This rarely comes up in evaluation and always comes up in year three.
Less standardised than most security categories, which makes comparison genuinely difficult. The models:
The costs that aren't in the licence: implementation and professional services (frequently a multiple of year-one licence for enterprise infrastructure PAM), connector or integration fees for anything non-standard, session-recording storage, and premium support tiers.
Ask for a three-year total cost of ownership. Comparing list prices across these models tells you almost nothing.
Print these. They're chosen because vague answers are informative.
Rushing the inventory is the most common mistake. It's also the step that makes every later step easier.
Josys approaches privileged access from the identity governance side: discovering elevated access across your SaaS estate including applications never enrolled in a PAM tool, tying entitlements to employment state so privilege moves when people do, and producing review and audit evidence continuously.
We're a good fit if your privileged exposure is SaaS-and-cloud-weighted and your core question is governance - who holds what, who approved it, is it still justified. We're not the right choice (as of today) if you need certified session recording on legacy on-premises databases; a dedicated infrastructure vault will serve you better there.
See the identity security and risk page, or book a demo.
A PAM platform is software that controls, monitors and records access by accounts with elevated permissions. Core capabilities are credential vaulting and rotation, session brokering and recording, just-in-time privilege elevation, and discovery of privileged accounts across the estate.
Coverage of the systems you actually run including SaaS admin accounts, discovery of privileged accounts you haven't imported, low-friction elevation, current identity provider integration, audit evidence an auditor accepts, break-glass access that works during an outage, and a clear migration path at renewal.
Pricing models vary widely - per privileged user, per managed target, per vaulted secret, or bundled into a broader platform — which makes list-price comparison unhelpful. Budget separately for implementation services, integration fees, session-recording storage and premium support, and ask for a three-year total cost of ownership.
A secrets manager focuses on machine credentials - API keys, tokens and certificates consumed by applications and pipelines. PAM covers human privileged access as well, adding session brokering, recording and time-bound elevation. Many organizations run both, since they address different populations.
Often not well. Traditional PAM was designed for servers, databases and network devices, and frequently has no visibility into who holds super-admin in SaaS applications. For SaaS-first organizations that's usually the largest remaining gap, so test SaaS admin coverage explicitly rather than assuming it.
Highly variable by category and scope. Infrastructure-first deployments in large estates are commonly measured in months rather than weeks, with professional services a significant cost line. Identity-platform-integrated approaches are typically faster to stand up but offer less session-forensics depth. Ask vendors for a timeline against an environment of your size, in writing.
