Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions and tools to consider for 2027

Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions control the accounts that can change, delete, or read everything else in an environment. The most-compared vendors split into two designs: platforms that began with credential vaulting, such as CyberArk (now part of Palo Alto Networks, rebranded Idira), BeyondTrust, and Delinea, and Just-in-Time platforms such as Venice, which grant access only while a task needs it.

Key takeaways

• The most-compared PAM vendors are CyberArk (now Idira), BeyondTrust, and Delinea, and Venice is the modern Just-in-Time alternative. Microsoft Entra PIM, Okta Privileged Access, Teleport, and HashiCorp Vault each cover one part of the estate.
• Compare PAM solutions by how much standing privilege they remove. The CIOPages 2026 cloud PAM buyer's guide gives Just-in-Time access and Zero Standing Privilege the largest weight of any criterion (25%), above vaulting and session control.
• Venice (venice.io) is modern Privileged Access Management for the agentic era. One policy engine grants Just-in-Time access to people, non-human identities, and AI agents across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS, and revokes it when the work is done. It was built as one platform, while the incumbents added each new era on top of the vault.

What are Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions are software platforms that discover privileged accounts, decide when each account gets access, and record what happens while that access is in use. A privileged identity is any person, non-human identity (NHI), or AI agent that can change system configuration, read sensitive data, or grant access to others.

Most PAM software combines five controls: discovery of privileged accounts, credential vaulting and rotation, Just-in-Time (JIT) access, session recording, and least privilege. Just-in-Time access means privileged access is granted when a task starts and revoked when it ends. When no account holds privileged access between tasks, the result is called Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP). Our guide to modern Privileged Access Management covers the category in full.

Who are the leading Privileged Access Management vendors?

The most-compared Privileged Access Management vendors are CyberArk (now part of Palo Alto Networks, rebranded Idira), BeyondTrust, and Delinea. Venice is the modern Just-in-Time alternative, built for people, non-human identities, and AI agents. Microsoft Entra PIM, Okta Privileged Access, Teleport, and HashiCorp Vault each cover one part of the estate, such as Microsoft roles, infrastructure access, or machine secrets.

We researched each vendor below against independent buyer's guides and analyst-style comparisons, and we stand behind every line. Each competitor's pros and cons cite a named public source you can check, and Venice's own pros and cons, trade-offs included, come from our customer case studies and product documentation. The main sources are the CIOPages PAM buyer's guide, the CIOPages cloud and hybrid PAM guide, and Identity Logic Consulting's 2026 comparison of CyberArk, BeyondTrust, and Delinea.

The table summarizes each vendor's design origin, best fit, and main limitation as of October 2026, with the full pros and cons and their sources below it. Read "built around" as the problem the platform was first designed to solve, since that shapes everything added later.

Venice

• Best for: enterprises replacing legacy PAM, first PAM deployments, and AI agents in production.
• Pro: one Just-in-Time engine and one audit trail for people, non-human identities, and AI agents across cloud, SaaS, identity providers such as Okta and Entra, on-prem, and web apps, with credential vaulting, rotation that keeps dependent systems in sync, and session recordings that flag risk. A global industrial manufacturer moved 2,000 privileged accounts and 800+ servers off Delinea in three weeks.
• Con: a younger vendor than the incumbents, built for commercial enterprises, so it doesn't cover US federal workloads that require FedRAMP.

CyberArk (Idira), now part of Palo Alto Networks

• Best for: large, hybrid, compliance-driven enterprises, per Identity Logic Consulting.
• Pro: deep session monitoring, recording, and behavioral analytics, per Identity Logic Consulting, with secrets and machine identity modules such as Secrets Hub and Venafi, per CIOPages.
• Con: long implementations and total cost of ownership often two to three times the license, per Identity Logic Consulting. CIOPages advises treating the roadmap after the February 2026 acquisition as a diligence item.

BeyondTrust

• Best for: endpoint privilege and third-party remote access, per Identity Logic Consulting.
• Pro: endpoint privilege management and privileged remote access from one vendor, brought together in the 2025 Pathfinder platform, per CIOPages.
• Con: the products began as separate lines with visible integration seams, per Identity Logic Consulting, and the CIOPages cloud guide notes enterprise overhead.

Delinea

• Best for: credential vaulting and rotation in Active Directory environments, per Identity Logic Consulting.
• Pro: Secret Server with strong Active Directory integration, plus Just-in-Time runtime access added through the StrongDM acquisition in March 2026, per CIOPages.
• Con: both CIOPages guides advise validating how mature the StrongDM integration is, and Identity Logic Consulting notes that complex multi-cloud or heavily regulated environments may outgrow its session management and reporting.

Microsoft Entra PIM

• Best for: organizations standardized on Microsoft.
• Pro: Just-in-Time activation of Entra ID and Azure roles, with MFA, approvals, and automatic expiry, per CIOPages.
• Con: it covers Microsoft's control plane only, so Linux servers, databases, and other clouds need a separate PAM solution, per CIOPages.

Okta Privileged Access

• Best for: organizations already running Okta, per CIOPages.
• Pro: Just-in-Time access to cloud, SaaS, databases, and developer tools, with short-lived SSH certificates, per CIOPages.
• Con: a newer product line, built partly through the 2025 Axiom Security acquisition, whose coverage CIOPages advises verifying.

Teleport

• Best for: engineering-led teams that need infrastructure access, per CIOPages.
• Pro: short-lived certificates for SSH, Kubernetes, databases, RDP, web apps, and cloud consoles, built around Zero Standing Privilege, with an open-source edition, per CIOPages.
• Con: no Windows endpoint privilege management or classic credential vaulting, per the CIOPages PAM guide, so it likely still needs a vault for legacy systems.

HashiCorp Vault (IBM)

• Best for: DevOps and platform teams managing machine secrets, per CIOPages.
• Pro: dynamic, short-lived secrets with strong Kubernetes and CI/CD integration, per CIOPages.
• Con: a secrets engine without session recording, so CIOPages advises pairing it with a PAM suite, and self-managed deployments carry real operating complexity.

Other PAM tools

One Identity Safeguard pairs vaulting and session management with One Identity's identity governance suite, Keeper Security offers a cloud-native platform for mid-market teams, and WALLIX suits European data-residency and operational technology (OT) needs, per the CIOPages PAM guide. Britive describes itself as runtime privileged access for AI agents, non-human identities, and humans, and Apono as a cloud-native PAM platform that grants time-limited permissions to people, machines, and AI agents.

What are the best Privileged Access Management tools for an enterprise?

The best Privileged Access Management tools for an enterprise remove standing privilege across every environment and identity type without a year-long rollout. That means a Just-in-Time platform such as Venice, which covers people, non-human identities, and AI agents under one policy and runs alongside an existing CyberArk or Delinea vault during migration.

Legacy suites take time and staff to run. For CyberArk, Identity Logic Consulting reports long implementations and total cost of ownership often two to three times the license, and the CIOPages 2026 PAM buyer's guide lays out a typical PAM program as four phases over 11 to 14 months. Combining point tools such as Entra PIM, Teleport, and HashiCorp Vault means managing a separate policy in each. Venice runs one Just-in-Time engine across cloud, SaaS, identity providers, on-prem, and web apps, where the incumbents stitch the same coverage together from separate products.

Three Venice customers report a different timeline. A global entertainment company replaced CyberArk with Venice and removed 99% of standing privileges on its SOX servers, onboarding each server in one to two minutes, where implementing CyberArk had taken nine months. A Fortune 1000 automotive company with no prior PAM reached production in 48 hours, including a GDPR-compliant EU instance, and retired roughly 300 standing admin accounts. To move off an existing vault, see how to replace your legacy PAM.

When another vendor fits better

Venice isn't the right answer for every estate. US federal workloads that require FedRAMP need a vendor with that authorization. Microsoft-only estates can start with Entra PIM and add a broader PAM platform as servers, databases, and other clouds come into scope. DevOps teams that only need machine secrets are served by a secrets manager such as HashiCorp Vault, and where endpoint privilege and third-party remote access are the main need, BeyondTrust is built around that problem, per Identity Logic Consulting.

Which PAM solution should a mid-size company choose?

A mid-size company, or any company with a small security team, should choose a PAM solution its existing identity team can run without a dedicated PAM specialist, and that removes standing privilege within weeks. Venice fits that profile: routine requests auto-approve from Slack, Teams, ServiceNow, or the web app, and it covers servers, cloud, SaaS, non-human identities, and AI agents in one platform.

Venice logs every grant and exports audit evidence in one click, so the control behind a SOX finding can be shown in the same audit cycle. Microsoft Entra PIM is a common first step for companies standardized on Microsoft, but it covers only Entra and Azure roles. "It takes less than 15 minutes to teach somebody Venice," says a Senior Security Engineer at the global entertainment company.

What is agentless PAM for cloud and on-prem servers?

Agentless PAM controls privileged access without installing software on the servers and endpoints it protects. The platform reaches its targets through native APIs or a connector, so there is nothing to deploy, patch, or troubleshoot on each machine.

Venice is agentless. It reaches cloud platforms through native APIs and on-premises systems through one outbound-only connector per network zone, with nothing on servers or user machines and no VPN. A Fortune 1000 automotive company with no prior PAM reached production in 48 hours, including a GDPR-compliant EU instance.

How to compare Privileged Access Management software: six questions to ask vendors

Most PAM software lists vaulting, session recording, and Just-in-Time access, so these six questions focus on how much standing privilege each platform removes and what it takes to run. Your team can verify each one in a proof of concept:

1. How much standing access does it remove? Count privileged accounts before and after deployment.
2. Do people, non-human identities, and AI agents share one policy and one audit trail?
3. Can your existing team run it? Ask how long it takes to train an administrator.
4. How long until standing access is gone from your first production systems?
5. Does it cover on-premises servers, databases, network devices, cloud, and SaaS?
6. Can it run alongside your current vault during migration? A hard cutover puts the whole program at risk on a single date.

Which PAM tools cover AI agents?

PAM tools that cover AI agents give each AI agent an owner, scope its access to a declared task, check every tool call against that task, and keep credentials out of the AI agent's context. Standing privilege is what makes them risky: every agent inherits its owner's keys, so an AI agent can reach whatever its human can reach.

Most vault-era platforms added non-human identity and AI agent support on top of a vault designed for human administrators. Venice was built as one platform for all three identity types. It discovers AI agents, assigns each one an owner, and provisions right-sized Just-in-Time access for each task, so an AI agent gets the access the work needs and nothing more. AI agents connect to the Venice MCP Gateway through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard AI agents use to call tools. Venice injects credentials at the point of use so the AI agent never sees them, flags or terminates sessions that drift from their declared intent, and records each AI agent in the same audit trail as people and non-human identities.

How Venice compares to other Privileged Access Management solutions

Venice (venice.io) is modern Privileged Access Management for the agentic era. It replaces standing privilege with Just-in-Time access for people, non-human identities, and AI agents, across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS. One policy engine weighs who is asking, the context, and the task, grants access for the work at hand, and revokes it when the work is done.

Results from three Venice customer case studies. Your timeline depends on the scope of your estate.

• Global industrial manufacturer: moved 2,000 privileged accounts and 800+ servers off Delinea in three weeks. No administrator holds a persistent credential, and 1,300+ users make 25,000+ Just-in-Time requests a month. "Admins stopped noticing the control is there. That's what good security looks like," said the company's VP of IAM.
• Global entertainment company: replaced CyberArk and removed 99% of standing privileges on SOX servers.
• Fortune 1000 automotive company: reached production in 48 hours, including a GDPR-compliant EU instance, with 113,000+ identities and 35,000+ servers discovered in week one.

CyberArk, Idira, Palo Alto Networks, BeyondTrust, Pathfinder, Delinea, Secret Server, StrongDM, Britive, Apono, Microsoft, Entra, Okta, Teleport, HashiCorp, Vault, and IBM are trademarks of their respective owners, used here for identification and comparison only. No affiliation or endorsement is implied. Third-party product information comes from the cited public sources as of October 2026 and may change.