Ping Identity and FusionAuth are two customer identity and access management solutions that have received a lot of attention recently. They share many features, but since they are designed to solve different challenges, they have important differences. Use this information to compare the two solutions and determine which has the features that match your company’s needs.
What Ping Identity and FusionAuth Have In Common
Unlimited Users and Groups
First, Ping Identity and FusionAuth are both web-scale applications designed to register and manage an unlimited number of users. Both take advantage of OAuth tokens & API key management providing secure access for web and mobile applications.
Essential CIAM Tools
They also both provide the essential tools modern customer identity management requires including multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) across multiple applications and devices. These are standard features of any CIAM, although they can be missing or insecurely implemented in custom-built solutions. In-house designed authorization systems also require constant evaluation and maintenance as technology and security threats evolve, shifting valuable developer resources away from core application features that generate revenue. Ping Identity and FusionAuth both eliminate this cost of maintenance providing a long term value to their clients.
While Ping Identity and FusionAuth share these benefits, they differ in several important ways.
How Ping Identity and FusionAuth Are Different
Free for Unlimited Users
One of the biggest differences between Ping Identity and FusionAuth is cost. FusionAuth is free for unlimited users. No strings, gimmicks, or tricks. No cost increases when you hit a certain Monthly Active User threshold. Much like a database or a web server, secure authentication is so essential that developers should be able to implement it quickly and easily without cost concerns. And unlike the free options from other vendors, we don’t feature-cripple or user-limit FusionAuth. You get the full unrestricted platform with every feature and benefit.
User Management, Reporting, and Analytics
A significant difference between Ping Identity and FusionAuth is how system administrators are able to organize, moderate, and monitor their users. FusionAuth was designed from the beginning to make it easy for administrators to not only authenticate users, but to manage and monitor user interactions with connected applications. The intuitive web-based user interface allows admins to efficiently manage users with flexible search, segmentation, reward and discipline functionality. FusionAuth also provides a selection of default user reports like daily/monthly active users, logins and registrations without any additional configuration or setup. Real-time dashboards provide a quick snapshot of current user statistics for at-a-glance updates of user activity. This is essential information for any growing company that needs to be able to monitor the outcomes of their most recent initiatives.
Single-Tenant Security
A big difference between Ping Identity and FusionAuth is that both of FusionAuth’s local and cloud options are true single-tenant solutions. FusionAuth’s solution can be deployed 100% on-premise or in a private cloud providing complete control of data storage locations and transmission pathways. FusionAuth’s single-tenant architecture also enables customers to implement a firewall at any layer, further protecting data privacy.
Single-tenant solutions like FusionAuth also allow for easier compliance with complex regulatory restrictions in many industries and countries. Germany’s Bundesdatenschutzgesetz, Australia’s Privacy Principles, Canada’s PIPEDA, and most recently the European Union’s GDPR all place different restrictions on how a customer’s personal data can be utilized and transmitted. FusionAuth provides companies with the expanded control required to comply with laws and regulations in their specific region or industry.
For more details on the benefits and pitfalls of single- and multi-tenant solutions read this whitepaper.
Configurable Password Encryption
Every application has different security requirements. Some need to be HIPAA compliant, while others can be less stringent. FusionAuth lets you pick the level of security you need, and adjust it quickly as your needs or threats evolve, including using different password schemas for different groups of users. This can be a completely transparent process without any downtime or customer friction.
To see this in action, read about how we migrated DataStax from their previous solution.
Enterprise Identity Unification (EIU)
Another way Ping Identity and FusionAuth differ is how they can handle complex bulk merger challenges. In today’s fast-moving business world, companies merge with or acquire partners and competitors every day. It’s a difficult challenge to combine and manage the unique databases of users that each company brings into the system. This is the realm of EIU and presents many complex issues such as duplicate users, incomplete or conflicting data, and varying password schemas.
FusionAuth allows a parent company to create unique internal tenants to isolate distinct datasets while still providing a single user management system for the overall organization. It gives the administrators incremental control over how and when the information is merged, and can even engage the users to manage, filter, and unify their own profile data.
If you would like more information on how FusionAuth enables effective EIU across multiple identity management systems, contact us.
Custom Feature Development
Another difference between Ping Identity and FusionAuth is our size and flexibility. Ping Identity is a large company supported by millions in investor funding. At their size, it is difficult to provide custom features or functionality for smaller companies with unique or non-standard needs.
FusionAuth is a small, bootstrapped company dedicated to our customers. We have successfully provided our core solutions with unique customizations and one-on-one support for our clients. We have eliminated the overhead, complex approval pipelines, and corporate red-tape that cripples large firms so we can deliver exceptional solutions for clients like DataStax, StrategyCorp, Deutsche Bank and IBM. If you have a specific challenge for managing users that we don’t already cover, we’ll work with you for a solution. This is an added benefit to having a single-tenant solution: your system can be customized to fit your specific requirements and specifications.
To see more details on how Ping Identity and FusionAuth stack up, download this feature comparison and please contact us if you have any questions.
Learn More About FusionAuth
FusionAuth is designed to be the most flexible and secure Customer Identity and Access Management solution available at the best price. We provide registration, login, SSO, MFA, data search, user management and more, 100% free for unlimited users. Find out more about FusionAuth and download it today.
Additional Comparisons
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