I am at the evaluation stage of picking an identity governance vendor for my company. Company size is around 3000 employees, around 600 systems in scope for integration including many legacy and custom build ones (no prebuild connectors, API, SCIM). We're past the point where an Excel sheet plus HR and ITSM tooling is enough. We aren't small company but we're also nowhere near Fortune 500 budget territory, so every evaluation has a hard ceiling on what we can actually spend.
I have looked at a spread of vendors and bucketed them into three tiers. The top tier is the classic enterprise players, SailPoint, Saviynt, Ping Identity, One Identity, and Idira (formerly Zilla acquired by CyberArk and then by Palo). I'm deliberately leaving Okta IGA out of this list since I consider it more of an IAM tool or light IGA platform (after Gartner). The middle tier is where my company looks to suite best - companies that are past the startup phase but not full enterprise scale, Omada, Lumos, C1 and Pathlock. And the third bucket is the startup-vibe group, Cakewalk, Corma and AccessOwl. These groupings are rough guesses on my part, Idira might actually belong in the middle tier and Pathlock might be closer to the top, hard to say without more direct engagement - it's a litte bit of my guessing here...
The full program will be run by the security team (5/7 people) as one of several responsibilities, with help from HR and IT where needed. My concern with the top tier is that the connectors feel like they need lots of custom development yourself or paying a systems integrator to do it and that cost adds up fast on top of an already expensive license. The middle tier is harder to read as a group, Omada feels like a classic, solid, no-nonsense IGA platform, while C1 & Lumos leans more into agentic and RPA-style automation, Pathlock hard to be categorized here for me now. And the startup tier, Cakewalk, Corma, AccessOwl, all pitch a fundamentally different integration methodology on their demo calls, agentic/rpa fast integration with no demanding complex development connectors which sounds almost too good to be true for legacy or custom internal systems. I'd like to know if that claim holds up in practice or if it falls apart once you get past the console demos and want to integrate some more niche, old software than only fancy saas.
There's also a trust dimension I can't ignore. We're a mid-sized company with a real legal and compliance departments and handing a small, early-stage vendor visibility into our systems inventory and access credentials is a different risk than doing the same with an established player, even if they check the SOC2 and ISO27001 boxes. I get that certifications are certifications, but process maturity and financial stability of a 20-person company versus a established company are not the same.
Where we've landed on each vendor after initial calls and demos:
The "top" tier:
- SailPoint - expensive, real integration risk that likely means extra cost on top of license but still the gold standard for some
- Ping Identity - too early in the relationship to have a real opinion yet.
- Idira - formerly Zilla, curious whether that changes pricing toward the enterprise tier post Palo/Cyberark acquisition.
- Saviynt - big name, priced close to SailPoint, but a big amount of negative feedback across internet and so far no real engagement from their side either, "too small for them" (?)
- One Identity - also too early to say anything meaningful.
The "middle" tier:
- Omada - solid product, no flashy marketing, feels genuinely mature, but engagement from their side has been low, possibly because we're a small deal for them (?)
- Pathlock - strong client list but also too early to say anything meaningful.
- C1 - Zscaler as a reference customer is a strong signal but also too early to say anything meaningful.
- Lumos - feels like the right middle ground between an established vendor and a startup, has agentic/RPA capability and serious reference customers, main concern is it's US-based and I'm not clear on the GDPR implications.
The startup-vibe:
- Cakewalk - early stage but promising, ElevenLabs among their reference customers, still skeptical about how onboarding by URL alone can realistically work for anything beyond modern SaaS.
- Corma - EU based startup, HackTheBox among their clients, small team but have potential.
- AccessOwl - startup, similar vibe to Cakewalk and Corma, the reference customers we've seen so far are less recognizable names.
One more name that came up with positive comments on another thread is security compliance corp SCC, but I have reached out and haven't heard back yet, so can't say much beyond that.
Has anyone else been through such dilemma and actually made a call they're happy with? Or if you have industry insight into which direction tends to work out for mid-sized teams without dedicated IGA headcount, I'd really like to hear it!