Enterprise identity teams spent most of 2025 and 2026 rethinking a question that used to have an easy answer: who gets access to what, and who proves it was the right call. Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is the layer that answers that question at scale, and the category has grown into real money while it does: Fortune Business Insights sized the global IGA market at $9.29 billion in 2025 and projects it will reach $10.7 billion in 2026. Three platforms now dominate the conversation for anyone shopping in September 2026: SailPoint Identity Security Cloud, Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud, and Microsoft Entra ID Governance. Two of the three just went through headline-grabbing capital events. SailPoint returned to the Nasdaq in February 2025 at a $12.8 billion valuation after three years under Thoma Bravo’s ownership. Saviynt raised $700 million in December 2025 at roughly a $3 billion valuation. Microsoft, meanwhile, keeps folding governance deeper into the Entra suite that most large enterprises already pay for.
This comparison breaks down pricing, AI-driven governance features, non-human identity support, analyst coverage, and the practical migration path between platforms. The goal is a buying decision grounded in verifiable numbers, not vendor marketing copy.
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What Is Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)?
IGA answers three questions continuously: who has access to which systems, whether that access is still appropriate, and whether it complies with policies like segregation of duties (SoD). It covers the full identity lifecycle, provisioning a new hire’s accounts, adjusting access when someone changes roles, and deprovisioning everything the moment they leave, plus periodic access certification campaigns where managers review and re-approve what their reports can touch.
IGA is frequently confused with two adjacent categories. Privileged Access Management (PAM), covered by vendors like CyberArk, BeyondTrust, and Delinea, vaults and session-records privileged credentials specifically, not the broader population of standard user access that IGA governs. Tech Insider’s breakdown of the PAM market after Palo Alto Networks’ roughly $25 billion CyberArk acquisition covers that consolidation in detail. Access management, the Okta/Auth0/Entra ID category that handles authentication and single sign-on, is a separate discipline too. See our Entra ID vs Okta vs Auth0 comparison for that side of the identity stack. IGA sits on top of both, answering the governance and compliance question rather than the authentication or privileged-session question.
Demand for IGA has shifted for a specific reason in 2026: identity sprawl no longer means just human employees. Service accounts, API keys, and autonomous AI agents now outnumber human identities in many environments, and none of them fit neatly into certification workflows designed for annual manager reviews of a person’s Salesforce access. The spending is following the sprawl: Fortune Business Insights puts North America’s share of global IGA revenue at 35% in 2025, and Research and Markets forecasts the category will compound at a 13.62% CAGR between 2026 and 2031 as that non-human identity problem keeps expanding the addressable workload. All three platforms compared here have spent 2025 and 2026 retrofitting governance for that reality, with varying degrees of maturity.
SailPoint vs Saviynt vs Microsoft Entra ID Governance at a Glance
The table below summarizes the core differences across deployment, pricing model, AI features, and ownership structure, based on vendor pricing pages and third-party benchmarking sources cited throughout this article.
| Attribute | SailPoint Identity Security Cloud | Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud | Microsoft Entra ID Governance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment model | Cloud-first SaaS, hybrid connectors for on-prem | Cloud-native SaaS | Cloud-native, native to Entra ID tenants |
| Pricing transparency | Not publicly listed; quote-based | Not publicly listed; quote-based | Published list pricing |
| Entry-level cost (per identity/user, per year) | Est. $72–$108/yr (Standard SaaS tier) | Est. $180–$300/yr | $84/yr add-on (requires Entra ID P1 or P2) |
| Bundled suite price | Business Plus tier, custom quote | Custom enterprise quote | Entra Suite at $144/user/yr, paid yearly |
| Free tier or trial | No published free tier | No published free tier | Requires existing Entra ID P1/P2 license |
| AI-driven access reviews | Harbor Pilot AI, AI Access Recommendations, Identity Outliers scoring | AI-optimized access modeling (vendor-described) | Lifecycle workflow automation, policy-based reviews |
| Non-human identity module | Non-Employee Risk Management (NERM), priced separately | Cloud role and service-identity governance (vendor-described) | Guest identity governance, billed per governed guest |
| SoD enforcement | Yes, native | Yes, native | Yes, via entitlement management policies |
| Best-known ecosystem fit | Multi-cloud, complex heterogeneous IT estates | Cloud-first, SaaS-heavy environments | Microsoft 365 and Azure-centric organizations |
| Ownership / backing | Public company (Nasdaq: SAIL) since Feb. 2025; previously Thoma Bravo-owned | Private; backed by KKR, Sixth Street Growth, TenEleven, Carrick Capital | Microsoft subsidiary product line |
| Latest major capital event | $12.8B Nasdaq IPO valuation, Feb. 2025 | Not listed | N/A (bundled into Microsoft’s broader Entra revenue) |
| Workflow limits by tier | 15 (Standard) / 50 (Business) / 200 (Business Plus) | Not publicly tiered | Governed by Entra ID Governance policy count, not a hard workflow cap |
| Best fit organization size | Large, complex multi-cloud enterprises | Mid-to-large enterprises wanting SailPoint-equivalent breadth at lower list cost | Organizations already standardized on Microsoft 365 E3/E5 |
SailPoint Identity Security Cloud: Platform, Pricing and 2026 Changes
SailPoint’s history explains a lot about how it’s priced and positioned today. Thoma Bravo took the company private in an all-cash transaction that closed on August 16, 2022, in a deal reported at $6.9 billion. Two and a half years later, SailPoint returned to public markets. Its IPO priced at $23 per share, the top of its marketed range, on February 12, 2025, with shares beginning to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market the next day under the ticker SAIL. According to SecurityWeek’s coverage of the offering, SailPoint and Thoma Bravo raised $1.38 billion in the upsized deal, and the company closed its first trading day with a market capitalization north of $13 billion. Reuters and CRN’s reporting put the debut valuation at $12.8 billion, making it the first major cybersecurity tech IPO of 2025.
On product, SailPoint’s core offering is Identity Security Cloud (ISC), sold across Standard, Business, and Business Plus SaaS tiers. Each tier increases both AI capability and workflow allowance: Standard covers basic access provisioning, certifications, and SoD with a 15-workflow limit and the company’s Harbor Pilot AI assistant. Business adds advanced AI access modeling and role mining with a 50-workflow limit. Business Plus adds Identity Outliers risk scoring and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) with a 200-workflow ceiling, according to pricing breakdowns published by CheckThat.ai. Third-party benchmarking from VendorBenchmark estimates enterprise buyers pay an effective $30 to $55 per identity per year for core IGA after negotiated discounts, against list pricing of $60 to $90 per identity per year, with additional per-identity charges for modules like Non-Employee Risk Management (NERM) at $12 to $22 effective per identity per year and Data Access Security at $10 to $18 effective per identity per year. SailPoint does not publish official list pricing, so these figures should be treated as third-party market estimates rather than vendor-confirmed numbers.
NERM is worth dwelling on because it’s SailPoint’s answer to the non-human identity problem: it’s a dedicated module for governing contractors, partners, and service accounts as a distinct risk category rather than folding them into standard employee workflows. Combined with CIEM in the Business Plus tier, it’s the clearest signal that SailPoint is treating machine and non-employee identity governance as a paid, first-class capability rather than an afterthought. On October 6, 2026, SailPoint made that split explicit, describing its Identity Security solution as two products built on SailPoint Atlas: SailPoint Human Fabric for workforce identities and SailPoint Agentic Fabric for non-human and agent identities.
Deployment realities matter too. SailPoint’s roots are in on-premises IdentityIQ, a product many large enterprises still run today, and SailPoint released IdentityIQ 9.0 for on-premises and hybrid deployments on October 6, 2026, which supersedes earlier IdentityIQ versions for any “latest version” claim. The company has spent years building a migration path from that legacy deployment into Identity Security Cloud. That history is exactly why SailPoint’s connector catalog reaches further into mainframes, homegrown ERP systems, and older financial applications than either of its two competitors here. For a bank or insurer running a 20-year-old policy administration system alongside modern SaaS tools, that connector depth is often the deciding factor, regardless of price. The tradeoff is complexity: SailPoint deployments for organizations with large, heterogeneous estates routinely involve systems integrator engagements that add real professional-services cost on top of the subscription itself, a line item that’s easy to underestimate when comparing headline per-identity pricing.
Where SailPoint’s Platform Roadmap Stands for Buyers
SailPoint’s October 6, 2026 announcements at Navigate 2026 matter to anyone planning a purchase or an upgrade. SailPoint said capabilities across Human Fabric, Agentic Fabric, and Atlas were beginning global rollout at Navigate 2026, and it announced SailPoint Autonomous Agents, built into the Atlas platform. It also announced a new South Korea data-center region for local data residency, and said programs for FedRAMP High and PCI DSS 4.0 were upcoming.
Some items are not yet available. SailPoint identified A-ISPM, the Harbor Pilot Policy Agent, and the Proofpoint integration as expected in Q4 FY27, so they belong on a roadmap column rather than in a feature comparison of shipped capabilities. On the services side, SailPoint announced tiered Success Acceleration Service Packages, combining expert roadmaps, deployment accelerators, AI-driven risk reduction, and continuous compliance support, which speaks directly to the professional-services cost covered in the total cost section below.
On the operational side, SailPoint published another production release for Human Fabric and Agentic Fabric on October 23, 2026. Its own site also highlights a Horizons of Identity Security finding that 79% of enterprises now run AI agents, but only 2% secure them, which explains why the vendor is pushing agent governance so hard. Buyers should ask each vendor for a written roadmap that separates released capabilities from announced ones, then tie contract milestones to what is generally available on the day of signing.
Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud: Platform, Pricing and 2026 Changes
Saviynt’s biggest 2026 headline is financial, not technical. On December 9, 2025, the company announced a $700 million Series B growth equity round led by KKR, with participation from Sixth Street Growth, Ten Eleven Ventures, and existing investor Carrick Capital Partners, at a valuation of approximately $3 billion. The company’s own press release frames the raise around positioning identity security as the foundation for the AI era, and SiliconANGLE’s coverage confirms KKR as lead investor with the same syndicate. It’s one of the largest single funding events in identity security to date and brings Saviynt’s total raised to roughly $870 million across its funding history.
Saviynt’s Enterprise Identity Cloud is marketed as cloud-native from the ground up, which the company positions as a structural advantage over IGA platforms that evolved from on-prem architectures. Pricing benchmarks from ERPResearch put typical Saviynt costs at $15 to $25 per user per month, or roughly $50 to $333 per user per year depending on contract structure and negotiated terms, positioning it modestly below SailPoint’s equivalent per-user pricing in most head-to-head enterprise deals. Like SailPoint, Saviynt does not publish official list pricing, so organizations need a custom quote to get firm numbers.
Functionally, Saviynt covers the same core ground as SailPoint, access certification, lifecycle provisioning, SoD enforcement, and role-based access modeling, with particular strength in governing access across a wide catalog of pre-built SaaS application connectors. Saviynt’s pitch to enterprises evaluating a switch from SailPoint tends to center on lower total cost of ownership for comparable functional coverage, rather than a fundamentally different governance model.
Saviynt’s KKR-led round is also notable for who else showed up on the cap table. Zscaler Ventures participated in the same Series B, and the two companies have since described deeper technical collaboration aimed at combining identity security with inline network enforcement, an early signal that Saviynt is positioning itself not just as a standalone IGA vendor but as a piece of a broader identity-centric zero trust stack. For buyers already running Zscaler for SSE or ZTNA, that alignment is worth watching over the next few product cycles, since integration depth between an IGA platform and the surrounding security stack tends to matter more in practice than any single feature comparison.
Microsoft Entra ID Governance: Platform, Pricing and 2026 Changes
Microsoft takes a different commercial approach entirely: publish the price, bundle it into an ecosystem millions of enterprises already run, and let scale do the selling. According to Microsoft’s official Entra pricing page, Entra ID Governance is sold as a $7.00-per-user-per-month add-on, billed annually, on top of an existing Entra ID P1 ($7/user/month) or P2 ($10/user/month) subscription. Organizations that want the broader bundle can instead buy the Microsoft Entra Suite at $12.00 per user per month, paid yearly, which wraps ID Governance together with Microsoft’s secure access (ZTNA-style) products into one bundle.
One pricing detail matters for any organization with a large external user population: guest identity governance is billed separately, on a consumption basis, at $0.75 per governed guest per month, only charged once per month regardless of how many governance actions apply to that guest in that period. According to Microsoft’s October 16, 2026 licensing documentation, guest governance uses Monthly Active User licensing separately from employee licensing and requires an Azure subscription. That model directly targets identity sprawl driven by contractors, vendors, and partner-organization accounts living inside a tenant, a population that’s grown substantially as more companies formalize AI-vendor and data-partner relationships.
Feature-wise, Entra ID Governance covers lifecycle workflows (automated onboarding and offboarding), entitlement management (packaging access into requestable bundles with approval chains), and access reviews (periodic recertification). It’s meaningfully less deep than SailPoint or Saviynt on cross-platform SoD modeling and third-party application coverage outside the Microsoft ecosystem, but for an organization that’s already standardized on Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, adding governance at $7 to $12 per user per month is a materially smaller lift than deploying a dedicated IGA platform from scratch. Our Entra ID vs Okta vs Auth0 comparison covers the underlying identity platform this governance layer sits on top of.
There’s a licensing wrinkle worth flagging for anyone budgeting off an existing Microsoft agreement: organizations already on Microsoft 365 E5, which bundles Entra ID P2, get a head start since the governance add-on’s prerequisite is already satisfied. Organizations on E3, which does not include P2, face a real choice between upgrading to E5 outright, an incremental cost that runs well above the governance add-on itself, buying the standalone Entra ID Governance add-on at $7/user/month on top of a P1 or P2 purchase, or buying the full Entra Suite at $12/user/month. Which path is cheapest depends heavily on how many of the other Entra Suite capabilities (like secure access and ZTNA features) the organization would use anyway. Treating the $7/user/month headline figure as the full cost of adoption is the single most common budgeting mistake Tech Insider sees in Microsoft governance rollouts.
How Independent Benchmarks and Review Platforms Score These Three
Because none of the three vendors publishes a standardized, audited efficacy benchmark for IGA (unlike, say, malware detection rates in endpoint security), pricing benchmarks from independent research firms are the closest thing buyers have to an apples-to-apples comparison, and even the top-line market-sizing numbers vary by analyst house: Market Research Future put the overall IGA market at $8.93 billion in 2025, while Research and Markets projects it reaching $9.57 billion in 2026, both broadly in the same neighborhood as Fortune Business Insights’ estimates despite none of the three firms sharing methodology. Three separate sources converge on a consistent directional picture even though their exact numbers differ. VendorBenchmark’s 2026 enterprise deal analysis puts SailPoint’s negotiated core IGA pricing at $30 to $55 per identity per year, well below its $60 to $90 list price, reflecting typical enterprise discounts of 35 to 48 percent. CheckThat.ai’s independent tier breakdown of SailPoint’s SaaS suites lands in a similar range once converted to an annual basis, and separately confirms the 15/50/200 workflow-limit structure across Standard, Business, and Business Plus. ERPResearch’s Saviynt review, a third independent source, positions Saviynt “modestly below SailPoint’s $20 to $30 per user per month equivalent” in typical enterprise deals, which is broadly consistent with the discount-adjusted SailPoint figures from VendorBenchmark even though the two research firms never directly compared notes.
On the review-platform side, the underlying user sentiment across G2 and Gartner Peer Insights-style community reviews consistently describes SailPoint as feature-rich but relatively expensive, Saviynt as offering comparable breadth at a lower price point with particular praise for its SaaS application coverage, and Microsoft Entra ID Governance as easy to adopt for organizations already inside the Microsoft ecosystem but narrower in scope than the two dedicated IGA specialists. SailPoint’s own site says it was recognized as a 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Identity Governance & Administration and that it leads by a clear margin in the 2026 KuppingerCole IGA Leadership Compass, though those are vendor-reported honors rather than a numeric rating. None of the three sources reviewed for this article published a specific, current numeric star rating precise enough to cite as a hard figure without risking inaccuracy, so this comparison deliberately describes the qualitative pattern rather than inventing a decimal-point score that isn’t independently verifiable as of publication.
Pricing Comparison: What 3,000 Identities Actually Cost
Because SailPoint and Saviynt don’t publish list pricing, the table below models a mid-size enterprise scenario, 3,000 governed identities, using the third-party benchmark ranges cited above, against a global IGA market that Market Research Future valued at $8.93 billion in 2025 and that’s still pulling in fresh vendor investment as a result. Treat these as directional estimates for budgeting conversations, not quotes.
| Platform | Pricing basis | Estimated annual cost (3,000 identities) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SailPoint ISC (Standard SaaS tier) | Est. $72–$108/identity/yr | $216,000 – $324,000 | CheckThat.ai / VendorBenchmark estimates |
| SailPoint ISC (enterprise core IGA, negotiated) | Effective $30–$55/identity/yr | $90,000 – $165,000 | VendorBenchmark enterprise deal analysis |
| Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud | $15–$25/user/month ($180–$300/yr) | $540,000 – $900,000 | ERPResearch pricing benchmark |
| Microsoft Entra ID Governance (add-on only) | $7/user/month + required P1/P2 | $252,000 – $324,000 (incl. P1/P2 base) | Microsoft official pricing |
| Microsoft Entra Suite (full bundle) | $12/user/month, paid yearly | $432,000 | Microsoft official pricing |
The spread is wide enough that pricing model matters more than headline rate. SailPoint’s enterprise-negotiated per-identity pricing can undercut its own published SaaS tier pricing once volume discounts apply, which is a strong argument for getting a real quote rather than budgeting off list numbers. Saviynt’s benchmark range runs highest in this model, though Saviynt’s own positioning is that it lands below SailPoint’s per-user equivalent in real deals, a discrepancy that likely reflects different assumptions about module bundling between the two benchmark sources. Microsoft’s numbers are the only ones confirmed directly from an official published price sheet, which makes them the most reliable baseline for budgeting even though the required P1/P2 prerequisite adds real cost most comparisons leave out.
AI and Agentic Access Governance in 2026
Every IGA vendor is now selling some version of AI-assisted certification review, and the differences are in how deep that automation actually goes. SailPoint’s Harbor Pilot AI sits across all three SaaS tiers and functions as a conversational assistant for identity administrators. Its higher tiers add AI-driven access modeling and role mining, which use historical access patterns to suggest role definitions rather than requiring administrators to hand-build them, and Identity Outliers scoring, which flags identities whose access profile deviates statistically from their peer group, a common early signal of both misconfiguration and compromised-account misuse.
Saviynt markets AI-optimized identity security as central to its post-funding roadmap, explicitly tying its December 2025 raise to AI-era identity positioning, and on October 20, 2026 it published “Zuma for Apps: Action Governance for AI Agents,” describing Zuma as its AI-security platform, though independently verified, named product benchmarks comparing its AI recommendation accuracy against SailPoint’s were not available at the time of writing. Microsoft’s approach is less about a standalone AI assistant and more about policy-driven automation embedded in lifecycle workflows, letting administrators define rules once and have Entra apply them consistently as employees move through roles, which is a narrower but more predictable form of automation than a recommendation engine.
The practical takeaway for buyers: AI-assisted certification review can meaningfully cut the hours managers spend rubber-stamping access reviews, but none of the three platforms has published independently audited accuracy figures for how often their AI recommendations match what a human reviewer would have decided. Treat AI governance claims from all three vendors as directionally useful rather than as a hard, comparable benchmark until third-party auditors publish head-to-head accuracy data.
There’s also a governance-of-governance question emerging in 2026 that none of the three platforms has fully solved: if an AI model is now recommending which access requests to approve, who certifies that the AI’s recommendations themselves stay within policy over time? SailPoint’s Identity Outliers scoring is the closest any of the three gets to an explicit answer, since it’s designed to flag drift in access patterns regardless of whether a human or an AI assistant approved the original request. Expect this to become a more explicit selling point across all three vendors’ roadmaps as auditors start asking pointed questions about AI-assisted certification decisions during SOX and HIPAA audits.
Governing Non-Human and Machine Identities
Non-human identity governance is the fastest-growing sub-category inside IGA in 2026, driven by the same trend covered in Tech Insider’s Astrix vs Oasis vs Entro comparison of dedicated non-human identity (NHI) security platforms: service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, and autonomous AI agents now often outnumber human employees inside a given environment, and traditional annual-review certification workflows were never designed for identities that don’t have a manager to certify them.
SailPoint’s answer is the standalone Non-Employee Risk Management module, priced separately per identity per year, which extends lifecycle and risk controls to contractors, partners, and service accounts as a distinct governed population rather than lumping them into employee workflows. Microsoft’s guest governance billing, at $0.75 per governed guest per month, targets a related but narrower slice: external human collaborators inside an Entra tenant rather than machine identities specifically, although on October 19, 2026 Microsoft announced expanded Microsoft Entra Agent ID identity types for additional agent patterns, including local and previously unknown agents discovered through security sensors. Saviynt’s cloud role and service-identity governance capabilities are positioned by the vendor as covering application accounts and cloud entitlements, though detailed independent documentation of exactly how Saviynt scopes and prices non-human identity governance separately from its core per-user model was limited in available sources.
It’s worth being explicit that none of the three platforms compared here is a purpose-built NHI security tool in the way Astrix, Oasis Security, or Entro are. They add governance and certification workflows on top of non-human identities that already exist. They don’t discover shadow API keys or rotate exposed secrets the way a dedicated NHI platform does. Large enterprises increasingly run both categories together, a traditional IGA platform for lifecycle governance and a dedicated NHI tool for discovery and secret hygiene, rather than treating one as a substitute for the other.
Where Gartner’s IGA Coverage Stands Now
Buyers researching this category should know that Gartner’s coverage structure has changed. Gartner previously published a dedicated Magic Quadrant for Identity Governance and Administration, ranking vendors across Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players quadrants. As of the most recent research available, Gartner’s current IGA coverage is published as a Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration, dated October 2, 2025, a report format that lists representative vendors without assigning the Leader/Challenger quadrant rankings a Magic Quadrant would. Third-party summaries of that Market Guide describe it as naming a broad vendor set including SailPoint, Saviynt, One Identity, Omada, Pathlock, Lumos, Veza, Radiant Logic, and Bravura Security, though Tech Insider was not able to independently confirm the primary Gartner document’s exact vendor list and commentary given access restrictions on Gartner’s site.
This matters for how buyers should read vendor marketing: any claim of being a Gartner IGA Leader published after 2025 deserves a second look, since the report format that produces that label may no longer exist for this specific category. Gartner does still publish quadrant-format research for adjacent categories. Its Magic Quadrant for Access Management, published in November 2025, named Microsoft and Okta as Leaders for the ninth consecutive year, and its Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management, published in October 2025, named CyberArk, BeyondTrust, and Delinea as Leaders, the same three vendors Tech Insider covers in its PAM comparison. Those are different product categories from core IGA, and a Leader designation in Access Management or PAM says nothing about a vendor’s IGA capability specifically.
5 Real-World Scenarios Where Each Platform Wins
Rather than naming unverified customers, the scenarios below reflect the deployment patterns each platform is consistently built and priced around, based on the module design, connector strategy, and pricing structure documented above.
- A multinational bank running SOX and SOD-heavy certifications across 40+ core banking systems. SailPoint’s mature SoD engine and deep connector library for legacy mainframe and on-prem financial applications make it the default choice for regulated financial services with complex, heterogeneous IT estates.
- A healthcare network managing HIPAA-driven access reviews across a mostly cloud SaaS stack. Saviynt’s cloud-native architecture and lower per-user cost profile suit organizations that have already consolidated onto SaaS and want full IGA breadth without SailPoint’s legacy-system connector overhead.
- A mid-market SaaS company standardized entirely on Microsoft 365 E5. Adding Entra ID Governance at $7/user/month is a far smaller lift than deploying a dedicated IGA platform, especially when the org’s application footprint is already Microsoft-centric.
- A professional services firm with heavy contractor and partner turnover. SailPoint’s NERM module or Microsoft’s per-governed-guest billing both directly target this population, and which one wins depends on whether the firm’s broader identity stack is already SailPoint or Microsoft-centric.
- A technology company scaling AI agent deployment across internal tooling. None of the three platforms is a purpose-built machine-identity tool, so this scenario increasingly means layering SailPoint’s or Saviynt’s governance certification on top of a dedicated NHI platform like the ones covered in Tech Insider’s non-human identity security comparison, rather than relying on core IGA alone.
Total Cost of Ownership Beyond the List Price
Every pricing figure in this article is a subscription or license cost. None of it includes the implementation cost, and for enterprise IGA deployments that gap can be substantial. SailPoint and Saviynt deployments at organizations with more than a few thousand identities and a meaningful legacy application footprint typically require a systems integrator or the vendor’s own professional services team to build custom connectors, migrate historical certification data, and tune role models, work that commonly runs into six figures for a mid-size enterprise rollout and can extend the project timeline by two to three quarters beyond the initial subscription signature. Microsoft Entra ID Governance’s narrower scope cuts this cost meaningfully for organizations that are already Microsoft-centric, since much of the connector work is native rather than custom-built, but organizations layering it on top of non-Microsoft applications will still need integration work for anything outside the Entra ecosystem.
Ongoing administration cost is the other line item that rarely makes it into a vendor’s pitch deck. IGA platforms need a dedicated identity governance team, or at minimum a fractional headcount, to maintain role models, tune SoD policies as the organization’s application footprint changes, and manage the quarterly certification campaign cycle. That labor cost is roughly comparable across all three platforms in absolute terms, but SailPoint and Saviynt’s broader feature surface area, more connectors, more module options, more workflow customization, tends to require more specialized administrator expertise than Microsoft’s narrower, more opinionated governance model. Factor internal headcount into any total cost comparison, not just the subscription line, before treating a lower per-identity list price as the deciding factor.
Migration Guide: Moving Between IGA Platforms
IGA migrations are multi-quarter projects in most enterprises, not weekend cutovers, because certification history, role models, and SoD policy libraries all need to carry over without gaps that create audit findings. The general sequence holds regardless of which platform you’re migrating to or from:
- Inventory current-state identities and entitlements. Export every identity, account, and entitlement from the legacy platform, including orphaned accounts that predate the current governance program, before touching the new platform’s configuration.
- Map role models and SoD policies to the new platform’s schema. SailPoint, Saviynt, and Entra ID Governance each model roles and policies differently enough that a direct one-to-one import rarely works cleanly, so budget time for manual reconciliation of edge cases.
- Run both systems in parallel for at least one full certification cycle. Access certifications are typically quarterly, and running the old and new platforms in parallel for one cycle catches gaps before the legacy system is decommissioned.
- Migrate connectors application by application, starting with the highest-risk systems. Financial systems and anything in SOX or HIPAA scope should be validated first, since a governance gap there carries the highest audit risk.
- Reconcile certification history and audit trails. Auditors will ask for historical certification evidence, so confirm the new platform can either import that history or that the legacy platform’s records remain accessible for the required retention period.
- Cut over non-human and guest identity governance last. These populations tend to have the least mature governance to begin with, so migrating them after core human-identity workflows are stable reduces the risk of compounding two unfamiliar processes at once.
- Decommission the legacy platform only after a full audit cycle passes clean on the new system. Keep read-only access to historical legacy data until retention requirements are satisfied.
Organizations moving from SailPoint’s older on-prem IdentityIQ product to any of the cloud platforms compared here face the steepest lift, since on-prem connector architectures and cloud SaaS connector models rarely translate directly. Moving from Saviynt or SailPoint into Microsoft Entra ID Governance is usually the fastest path when the target environment is already Microsoft-centric, since the destination platform’s scope is narrower by design.
Pros and Cons of Each Platform
SailPoint Identity Security Cloud
Pros:
- Deepest connector library for complex, heterogeneous, and legacy IT estates
- Mature SoD and certification engine with a long enterprise track record
- Dedicated non-employee risk module for contractors and service accounts
- Now a public company with audited financials, which some risk-averse procurement teams weight favorably versus privately-held competitors
Cons:
- No published pricing, so budgeting requires a sales cycle
- Workflow limits on lower tiers (15 on Standard) can force an upgrade sooner than expected
- Historically priced at a premium versus Saviynt for comparable core functionality
Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud
Pros:
- Cloud-native architecture built for SaaS-heavy environments
- Benchmark pricing positions it below SailPoint’s per-user equivalent in most deals
- Fresh $700 million in capital gives it runway to invest aggressively in AI features through 2026 and beyond
Cons:
- No published pricing, and third-party benchmark ranges vary widely ($50 to $333 per user per year)
- Less connector depth than SailPoint for legacy on-prem and mainframe systems
- Still privately held, which some enterprise procurement teams weight against it versus a public competitor
Microsoft Entra ID Governance
Pros:
- Only one of the three with fully published, transparent list pricing
- Lowest incremental cost for organizations already licensed for Entra ID P1/P2
- Tightest native integration with Microsoft 365 and Azure
- Consumption-based guest billing avoids overpaying for external users with sporadic access needs
Cons:
- Requires an existing Entra ID P1 or P2 subscription as a prerequisite, so the $7/user/month headline price understates true cost for non-Microsoft-licensed organizations
- Narrower third-party application connector catalog than SailPoint or Saviynt
- Less mature SoD modeling for complex multi-cloud, non-Microsoft environments
Which IGA Platform Should You Choose?
The right platform depends more on your existing IT estate and compliance profile than on any single feature checkbox. Five scenarios cover most buying decisions:
- Choose SailPoint if you run a complex multi-cloud or hybrid environment with legacy on-prem systems, need mature SoD enforcement for financial services or SOX compliance, and can absorb a premium price for the deepest connector catalog on the market.
- Choose Saviynt if you’re cloud-first, want comparable core IGA breadth to SailPoint at a lower benchmark price point, and are comfortable betting on a well-funded but still-private vendor.
- Choose Microsoft Entra ID Governance if your organization is already standardized on Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Entra ID P1/P2, and you want governance capability without standing up a separate platform and vendor relationship.
- Choose a hybrid approach (Entra ID Governance for Microsoft-native workloads plus SailPoint or Saviynt for everything else) if you’re a large enterprise with a mixed estate and want to avoid over-licensing a full IGA platform just to cover Microsoft-native access.
- Choose neither, for now, and prioritize a dedicated NHI platform first if your primary access risk today is unmanaged API keys and service accounts rather than human employee certifications, since none of the three platforms in this comparison is purpose-built for machine identity discovery.
The Verdict: SailPoint vs Saviynt vs Entra ID Governance
There’s no single winner here, and treating this as a head-to-head with one champion misreads the category. SailPoint remains the safest default for large, complex enterprises that need deep legacy connector coverage and have already budgeted for premium IGA pricing, backed now by the credibility of a public listing and a $12.8 billion market debut. Saviynt is the strongest challenger on cost for cloud-first organizations, and its $700 million KKR-led raise gives it real capital to close feature gaps with SailPoint over the next two to three years. Microsoft Entra ID Governance is the pragmatic choice for the large population of organizations that are Microsoft-centric enough that a dedicated IGA platform would be over-engineering, at a published price point neither competitor will match. All three are competing for a bigger pie than they were a year ago, too: Fortune Business Insights projects global IGA spend climbing to $10.7 billion in 2026, and Research and Markets expects the category to keep compounding at roughly 13.62% annually through 2031, which is a big part of why Saviynt and SailPoint’s backers wrote such large checks in the first place.
The number that should anchor any 2026 buying decision isn’t a feature checklist, it’s the per-identity cost multiplied across your actual governed population, checked against how much of your estate is Microsoft-native versus heterogeneous. Run that math with real quotes from at least two of the three vendors before committing, since none of them publish pricing precise enough to budget from a comparison article alone, Microsoft included, once the P1/P2 prerequisite is factored in.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is SailPoint publicly traded?
Yes. SailPoint returned to the public markets on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker SAIL, with its IPO pricing on February 12, 2025, and trading beginning the following day. It had previously been public from 2017 until Thoma Bravo took it private in an all-cash deal that closed August 16, 2022.
Is Saviynt publicly traded?
No. Saviynt remains a private company. According to transaction coverage, its most recent capital event was a roughly $600 million continuation vehicle closed by Carrick Capital Partners, including $255 million of new capital.
How much does Microsoft Entra ID Governance cost?
Microsoft’s published price is $7.00 per user per month, billed annually, as an add-on that requires an existing Entra ID P1 ($7/user/month, or $84 per user per year) or P2 ($10/user/month, or $120 per user per year) subscription. The bundled Microsoft Entra Suite, which includes governance plus secure access features, is $12.00 per user per month.
What is the difference between IGA and PAM?
IGA governs the broader population of standard user access across applications and systems, provisioning, certification, and SoD enforcement. PAM specifically vaults, monitors, and session-records privileged and administrative credentials. Most large enterprises run both, an IGA platform like SailPoint or Saviynt alongside a PAM platform like CyberArk, BeyondTrust, or Delinea.
Does Gartner still rank SailPoint and Saviynt as Leaders in a Magic Quadrant?
Gartner’s most recent identifiable IGA research, dated October 2, 2025, is published as a Market Guide rather than a Magic Quadrant. Market Guides list representative vendors without assigning Leader, Challenger, Visionary, or Niche Player rankings, so any current marketing claim of an IGA Magic Quadrant Leader position deserves scrutiny.
Can Microsoft Entra ID Governance replace SailPoint or Saviynt entirely?
For organizations that are almost entirely Microsoft 365 and Azure-based, it can cover core governance needs. For organizations with significant non-Microsoft, on-prem, or legacy application footprints, Entra ID Governance’s connector catalog and SoD modeling are generally less mature than SailPoint’s or Saviynt’s, making a hybrid approach more common than a full replacement.
What does non-human identity governance mean in this context?
It refers to extending lifecycle and certification controls to service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, and AI agents, not just human employees. SailPoint addresses this through its separately priced Non-Employee Risk Management module. Microsoft addresses external human collaborators through consumption-based guest governance billing. None of the three platforms is a purpose-built machine-identity discovery tool in the way dedicated NHI security vendors are.
How long does an IGA platform migration typically take?
Most enterprise IGA migrations span multiple quarters rather than weeks, since certification history, role models, and SoD policies all need reconciliation, and best practice calls for running old and new systems in parallel for at least one full certification cycle before decommissioning the legacy platform.
Does the $7/user/month Entra ID Governance price include everything I need?
No. It’s an add-on that requires an existing Entra ID P1 ($6/user/month) or P2 ($9/user/month) subscription, so the effective cost is $13 to $16 per user per month once the prerequisite license is included, unless the organization already holds that license through Microsoft 365 E5 or a separate Entra ID purchase.
Which vendor is best for a company just starting to formalize access governance?
Organizations without an existing IGA program and a Microsoft-centric application footprint typically see the fastest time-to-value from Microsoft Entra ID Governance, since it requires the least net-new infrastructure. Organizations with complex, multi-vendor environments from day one are more likely to need SailPoint’s or Saviynt’s broader connector catalogs even at the start of their governance program, since retrofitting a narrower platform later tends to cost more than starting with sufficient breadth.
