Microsoft Entra ID vs. Univention Corporate Server (UCS)

For one, a significant factor for us is that it is integrated with HelloID, which gives us, as the IT department, a lot of time back because we don’t need to create user accounts manually. It is great for the roles we have defined, as they can be used repeatedly. A great feature is that guest accounts can be created for external users; we only need to be in a closed area of your domain.

Incentivized

Univention Corporate Server is well suited:

1. If an Organization would like to use it as a complete Active Directory Server.
2. If an Organization wants to deploy other applications which are important like SSO, Mail Server, 2FA etc., as with one click all these Apps will be integrated magically thus reducing the Admin job considerably.
3. Web based management which will be quite useful for the Admins who are from Windows background only.
4. Univention as a company which has close to 2 decades of experience.

• It addresses the issue of identity management very well with respect to putting in that multi authentication.
• It can also support with respect to we can push these policies into another product that is not Microsoft, but it needs that SSO so we can have one account going into multi different accounts. I think that's the biggest pros and the easy use of Microsoft 365 also is one of those pros also in terms of administration.

Incentivized

• Complete replacement for MS Active Directory Server.
• Univention App Center - awesome concept with which Apps can be installed for the Domain.
• App Center can be compared to Google Play Store or Apple Play Store - Organizations can gain tremendous advantages.
• Plethora of Apps which are both free and paid and excellent apps for the Organizations.

• Well, I'm an active ad admin, so there's a lot of features in active directory that Entra ID seems to be just adding now. We're kind of figuring out that the policies are different than Entra ID that they were in active directory and we're finding other products to do that, like Azure policy. Some things I'm used to seeing in identity products or like active directory aren't in Entra iID, but are doing good job of managing stuff that it does so far.

Incentivized

• As Univention is from Germany, lot of informative articles are in German but English articles are also good but less in number.

Entra ID is a vital part of our Identity management/administration. With the integrations it has to other Microsoft products, setup and configuration is a breeze. Additionally, Microsoft has been around a long time and have the resources to ensure this product is stable and secure for many years to come. We know it will evolve with time to provide us what we need as technology changes.

Incentivized

Very easily usable. It could be easier to use. Implementation was kind of tricky. We do run a hybrid environment, so we're syncing a local active directory instance with Entra ID, so that could be a little tricky. But outside of that, if you're not running a hybrid deployment or a version of Entra ID usually, it's pretty straightforward.

Incentivized

There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe

Incentivized

I could probably rate this a 10 but I'm always conservative on giving out perfect scored bt performance has not been a problem for us using Entra ID.

Incentivized

Microsoft has offered Azure Active Directory as a solution for a couple of decades now, so they have seen and anticipated almost any issue that an organization may face and can therefore help. The cloud offering of Azure Active Directory offers some additional "self healing" or monitoring services that can minimize the need for a service call. However, as with most large companies supporting a fast growing market, there may be some gaps in service knowledge (and particularly processing) from the front line / tier one staff as they follow a corporate script at first contact.

Incentivized

Most training was internally produced

Incentivized

Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.

Incentivized

Microsoft Entra ID is not as stand-alone product as competitors like Okta. It may lack some of the features that competing products have but on the other hand it integrates both technically and license wise with other Microsoft cloud services and is easy to deploy. It is also the easiest way to extend identity management to the cloud if you already have Microsoft Active Directory in use.

Incentivized

We have evaluated Zentyal and ClearOS but we found out that UCS is more suited to every Organization.

Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.

Incentivized

• I don't know if I can really quantify that. It's one of those products that just exists and so there's not a whole lot of changes that we need to make with the product. And so I guess in terms of value, what we get is we don't have to worry about the identity management piece. We know that that's taken care of.

Incentivized

• As a partner, we have gained lot of respect from our customers as UCS is rock solid.
• UCS is truly Open Source.
• UCS has surpassed our expectations.