SailPoint, Saviynt or Entra ID Governance? Start with where your apps live

You'll live with an identity governancedefinitionThe tools and process that decide who should have what access, grant and remove it as people join, move and leave, and prove it to auditors. Often shortened to IGA. platform for years, and the three names on most shortlists do different jobs well. Start from where your applications sign in and how much of your estate is on-premises or SAP, then price the full scope before you compare features.

Microsoft Identity Manager still runs on-premises in plenty of Microsoft shops, and for customers with Entra ID P1 or P2 its support now ends in January 2029. IdentityIQ customers have a choice to weigh between the announced 9.0 release and a move to SailPoint's cloud. Meanwhile every vendor is pushing governance for AI agents, often licensed separately. Any one of those puts the platform question back on someone's desk.

Getting it wrong is expensive in a quiet way. A tool that can't reach half your applications leaves someone reconciling spreadsheets before every audit, and the licence keeps billing anyway. Moving off an IGA platform later means rebuilding roles, rules and connectors, which is often the biggest cost.

For engineers, the column that matters most is the connector model. Entra reaches on-premises apps through a provisioning agent and the ECMA Connector HostdefinitionThe piece Microsoft uses to provision from Entra into on-premises apps. It runs next to a provisioning agent, and you can load the connectors you built for Microsoft Identity Manager into it., which can import the ECMA2 connectors you built for MIM. SailPoint and Saviynt each sell a catalogue of their own connectors and let you build more for the apps they don't cover.

We kept to what each vendor's documentation and pricing pages say today. Neither SailPoint nor Saviynt publishes prices, so the cost row says what drives the number, and the Entra figures are Microsoft's list prices before any discount.

Big, mixed estates usually lean toward SailPoint. Its catalogue lists more than 500 connectors and integrations, and if you can't move to SaaS yet, IdentityIQ still runs on your own servers. When reviewers face thousands of entitlements they can't judge, role discovery and AI-assisted certifications take some of the load off.

The catch is the road between its two products. Practitioners on SailPoint's developer forum keep saying IdentityIQ to the cloud is a rebuild. They report that plugins aren't available in Identity Security Cloud, and one forum member counted under 20 rule types in the cloud against about 200 in IdentityIQ, back in 2025. The more custom code you carry, the longer that move takes.

Saviynt fits teams that want governance, ERP access controls and PAM from one vendor. Its Application Access Governance ships separation-of-duties rulesets for SAP, Workday and Oracle, and Saviynt-built connectors are included in the tier price instead of sold one by one. You can host it in Saviynt's cloud or in your own AWS, Azure or GCP account, which some regulated buyers want.

Check two things before you sign. Test Saviynt's PAM against your privileged-access needs on its own, and ask whether you'll still keep a dedicated PAM tool next to it. Its migration tooling names IdentityIQ and Oracle Identity Manager, so if you're coming from something else, ask what it actually covers.

Entra ID Governance fits Microsoft-first companies whose apps already sign in through Entra. There's no new platform to run and the list price is public. Lifecycle Workflows, access packages and access reviews work on the same groups and apps your admins already manage, and API-driven inbound provisioning can take HR data from any system of record.

The catch is reach. Access reviewdefinitionA campaign where managers or app owners confirm whether each person still needs their access. Microsoft calls it an access review; SailPoint and Saviynt call it a certification. decisions can't change a group synced from on-premises Active Directory, so someone downloads the results and fixes AD by hand. The ECMA Connector Host only handles user objects today. On its own, Entra handles separation of dutiesdefinitionRules that stop one person holding two conflicting permissions, such as creating a supplier and approving its payments. Usually shortened to SoD. by marking access packages or groups as incompatible, and finer SAP rules need SAP's access governance or a partner product connected to it. Teams with heavy SAP rules or a big on-premises estate often end up adding a dedicated tool on top.

Each of these comes from vendor documentation, the FedRAMP Marketplace or practitioners on vendor forums. They rarely make the sales deck, and each one can change your design.

• Entra: you need enough Governance licences for every member user in scope of a feature. Licensing only the IT team that builds the workflows doesn't cover it, as an answer on Microsoft Q&A confirms.
• Entra: when a review denies someone in a group synced from on-premises AD, the result isn't applied. Microsoft tells you to download the results and change the group in AD yourself.
• Entra: an accepted answer on Microsoft Q&A says Workday inbound provisioning can't run scheduled full syncs, so rules like enabling an account the day before hire may not fire on time.
• Entra: the provisioning agent doesn't update itself for on-premises app provisioning. Somebody has to own patching it.
• SailPoint: Identity Security Cloud tenants start with default limits of 3,000 access profiles and 800 roles, per practitioners on SailPoint's forum. SailPoint raises them on request, so ask early if your catalogue is big.
• SailPoint: forum members report that some IdentityIQ certification types, such as account group permissions, have no direct equivalent in the cloud yet.
• SailPoint: a practitioner on the forum advises against running IdentityIQ and the cloud side by side for long, especially with attribute sync on in both, because of data integrity problems.
• Saviynt: its FedRAMP High listing showed no agency authorizations in October 2026, and its own blog uses both 'achieved' and 'pursuing'. Federal buyers should confirm status directly.

Most of the cost of a governance project sits in the applications, the HR data and the roles, and that stays true whichever product you pick. The migration effort depends a lot on where you start.

From IdentityIQ to SailPoint's cloud. SailPoint offers a free assessment tool, and its Agentic Acceleration offer comes at no extra cost. Treat it as a re-design anyway. Practitioners say custom rules have to be redesigned as workflows, API calls or external services, and forum members report that plugins aren't supported and custom objects don't migrate directly.

From IdentityIQ or Oracle Identity Manager to Saviynt. Saviynt's Migration Workbench reads the old configuration and maps what it can. Saviynt says 60 to 70 percent of objects usually map directly. The rest needs specialists, with the tool's help, so budget for that part rather than the headline.

From MIM or SAP Identity Management to Entra. Microsoft publishes migration guides for both and recommends moving one scenario at a time. On-premises provisioning goes through the ECMA Connector Host, and you can bring over the configuration of custom MIM connectors. S/4HANA is reached through SAP Cloud Identity Services, so users have to exist in Entra first.

We start with your application list and audit scope, then tell you plainly which tool fits and where you'd need a second one. Our identity engineers work on SailPoint, Saviynt and Microsoft Entra, including IdentityIQ upgrades and moves off MIM. Read about our identity governance practice, or start with an assessment.