--- title: StrongDM Reviews meta_title: 'StrongDM Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 102 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how StrongDM works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.6 review_count: 102 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-09' parent_category: name: Identity Management url: https://www.g2.com/categories/identity-management --- # StrongDM Reviews **Vendor:** strongDM **Category:** [Privileged Access Management (PAM) Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/privileged-access-management-pam) **Average Rating:** 4.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 102 ## About StrongDM StrongDM is the leader in Zero Trust PAM. We are a policy-based platform that enables precise control over privileged actions and grants secure, compliant, frustration-free access to all critical infrastructure. End users enjoy fast, intuitive, and auditable access to the resources they need, and administrators leverage simplified workflows to enhance security and compliance postures. ## StrongDM Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **ease of use** with StrongDM, enjoying straightforward setup and intuitive navigation for secure connections. (12 reviews) - Users commend the **user-friendly management** of StrongDM, facilitating seamless access and quick setup for enhanced productivity. (6 reviews) - Users commend StrongDM for its **exceptional customer support** , consistently receiving quick and knowledgeable assistance whenever needed. (5 reviews) - Users commend the **easy setup** of StrongDM, enabling quick integration and smooth onboarding for teams. (5 reviews) - Users find StrongDM's **intuitive design** makes setup and maintenance straightforward, enhancing overall user experience and efficiency. (5 reviews) - Users value StrongDM for its **enhanced security** , ensuring meticulous auditing and compliance for resource access management. (5 reviews) - Users highlight the **setup ease** of StrongDM, noting its straightforward and intuitive configuration process and quick onboarding. (5 reviews) - Users appreciate the **simple access control** in StrongDM, making it easy to manage sensitive system access. (3 reviews) - Auditing (3 reviews) - Policy Management (3 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face **implementation difficulties** with StrongDM, citing challenges in setup and client-based access that disrupt workflows. (3 reviews) - Users criticize the **lack of features** in StrongDM, hindering efficiency and user experience for specific integrations. (3 reviews) - Users find the **complex setup** of StrongDM frustrating, citing client installation and manual processes as inconveniences. (2 reviews) - Users find the **navigation confusing** on the documentation site, often resorting to search engines for information. (2 reviews) - Users find the **UI less intuitive** and desire enhancements for a better desktop app user experience. (2 reviews) - Users find the **access control options limited** , causing frustration due to lack of configurability and flexibility. (1 reviews) - Command Issues (1 reviews) - Users face **customization difficulties** with StrongDM, as limited flexibility hinders specific setups and integrations. (1 reviews) - Difficult Learning (1 reviews) - Difficulty Locating (1 reviews) ## StrongDM Reviews ### 1. Locks down data and app access for security **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** It is fairly easy to use. I like that it stays in the top toolbar of my machine so that a full app doesn't have to be open and running. It has the ability to group various services and sort by the ones you want visible. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** There was usually a lag of 2-3 minuted between database approval and being able to select/ enable the database in SDM. Their recent redesign threw me for a loop as it almost looked like a different app/ UX. It also seems a bit cumbersome to have to do a web-based login through Okta, but that's likely a SSO limitation on Mac, etc. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** database security and access ### 2. One stop shop for access management **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christopher G. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 06, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** StrongDM provides a transparent view of user access. Giving us logs for every user action through StrongDM and just-in-access to those resources. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Honestly, so far nothing. It's really difficult to come up with something to dislike about it. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had a VPN however there was no insight into any user activity at the access level. StrongDM allowed us to not only remove our VPN but gave us more insight into user activity for those resources. It also made onboarding significantly easier because all system access is through StrongDM. ### 3. Powerful, excellent, does one thing extremely well. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Gives me secure access fast, when I need it. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** The menu bar UI is a *little* weird and non-traditional. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Accessing production servers safely. ### 4. Powerful tool for access management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Temporary access grants is fantastic The ability to automate access requests/approval is mission-critical (currently using an access bot). SSO integration helps a lot with user management **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Improved client software stability and the ability to reconnect automatically are needed when using SDM for automated processes that rely on SDM db connection. Better logging/audit trail that is exportable Direct integration with monitoring systems Datadog, CloudWatch, etc) or better monitoring facility **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Temporary access grants for accessing sensitive data Access granting automation allows for low friction workflow ### 5. Audit and Admin features make strongDM a valuable tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steve F. | Systems Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** strongDM's features around audit and observability make it invaluable to our team. Features like SSH session replays, audit logs, and time-based permissions are core to our use case and simply weren't offered by other products. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** strongDM could further simplify their user experience within the admin application. Recent redesigns have been helpful but haven't fully addressed the issue. Nagging client application connectivity issues can sometimes be a bit annoying. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** strongDM allows our team to provision time-based and auditable access to critical production resources. It allows us to simplify resource configuration and automate the creation and management of those resources. ### 6. StrongDM just works! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gerry L. | Infrastructure Engineering Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** The management of the system is so simple and easy. It's no burden at all to manage because every from installation to maintenance is a breeze. And their support is the best I've ever worked with. I always tell everyone the same thing...if something is wrong, there will be 4 StrongDM engineers on a zoom call with you within 5 minutes to help troubleshoot. Everytime something was wrong, it ended up being our own misunderstanding or network misconfiguration....StrongDM is rock solid! They have also taken our feedback very serious and worked aggressively to add features to their product that we asked for (within reason). **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Nothing. Seriously. I truly have nothing bad to say about StrongDM. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** StrongDM takes away the burden of having to manage a VPN. IT's also safer than a VPC since it links users directly to endpoints, instead of allowing users to enter an entire network. They also provide a great audit trail about what users do, once connected to resources. This makes compliance reporting much easier to generate. ### 7. StrongDM's commitment to quality **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Leon J. | Engineering Manager, SRE, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** StrongDM is committed to delivering a great product and pairing with us to ensure that the product is the correct solution for us. While I can't speak to their competition, I can say that their willingness to improve their products based on feedback sets them apart from the rest. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** I want more metrics on user logins and a more accessible audit trail so that I may better understand how our engineering are accessing resources. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** StrongDM allows us to sync Okta roles to AWS IAM roles without having to assign permissions statically. ### 8. Access to resources in single click! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Public Relations and Communications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** StrongDM helped to mitigate old solutions using VPN and right now all of our engineers can connect to the resources in just one click! It is super easy to setup new resource. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** You need to create as any resource as access levels to them, so it complicates a lot, as you would like to have one single resource configured with x access levels, you need to create x times resources. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Stopping using legacy VPN client and having least-privileges approach. ### 9. Access Management Done Right **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2023 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** StrongDM gives you access a large suite of tools to provide access to seemlessly. This is true across StrongDM whether you're using the UI console or automating it end to end using Terraform. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** So far I can't name anything I dislike. The support team is quick to respond and handle issue, but truely we've not found anything yet to complain about as it covers all of our requirements and then some. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Generally speaking we now have a workflow to providing access across all variants of enviorments from development to production with great auditing when coming so you always feel confident that you know what the access is being given and how it used. Outside of this the capabilities such as accessbot extend what is already a great tool. ### 10. StrongDM is a great way to access your production databases **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** It's a super convenient way for the whole team to access our production databases. Granting access is easy, and thanks to the ability of strongdm to log all the queries, we can confidently give access to more people. This means we can have more people involved. Thus, senior people, traditionally with higher privileges and database accesses, don't have to do all the small tasks that require those access anymore. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** There is nothing I especially dislike about strongdm. I like the product as it is now, and they are making improvements regularly. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** The main problems strongdm is solving for us are: - granting access to our production database to everyone that might need it in the company - being able to audit all the queries that have been run in production ### 11. StrongDM has Secured our SHell **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joseph S. | Lead System Administor, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 27, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** I think it does an excellent job of access management. Setting up the roles and assigning them to users is very simple and reacts instantly. Their support team has done an outstanding job of responding to our needs and helped us get each issue handled in a very short time. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** RDP access has been a bit of a letdown. It works, but it logs each user in as the same user, which doesn't work well with windows file permissions. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** StrongDM solved our concerns around having ssh keys, or God forbid shared passwords, floating around where we didn't want them. We were able to lockdown our ssh_config in a much better way. ### 12. SDM is great, it just works! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mischa F. | Systems Administrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** We like that StrongDM is simple to use for admins and end users. For the most part, we don't notice SDM is there, which is exactly what we want. Users that were initially skeptical have been impressed and prefer StrongDM to the old way of doing things. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** There's not much we dislike, overall its great. The 2 features that could use some more attention are the websites and RDP, not what we purchased SDM for though. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our primary focus was secure, revokable and short lived ssh access to resources. No more sprawling SSH keys, and database access is a lot easier and more secure. ### 13. Amazing product with a great team **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 08, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** strongDM's product is extremely intuitive and powerful. We use it to manage remote access to customer sites; auditing and RBAC are crucial for our use case, and these features are baked right into the product and are easy to use. We can set up approval workflows using AccessBot's native features or custom workflows using the API. Everyone at the company that we've worked with -- Sales, Customer Success, and Support -- is passionate about the product and great to work with. I would recommend strongDM, both as a product and a company, to anyone looking to secure access to their infrastructure. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Currently, strongDM is a SaaS-only offering. While I prefer the SaaS offering since it greatly simplifies the architecture on our end, we have some customers requesting that we run an on-prem solution. This is currently in the works on their side but not available yet. While competing products offer on-prem solutions, strongDM's product is vastly superior, so switching to a competing on-prem solution would be a last resort. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** strongDM gives us secure remote access to customer environments while providing auditing and RBAC. ### 14. Great product and great people **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** strongDM gave us access control and visibility for our most critical data for the first time. Legacy OS and database versions were already supported or custom-built for us - the architecture of the tech makes deployment far easier than agent deployment/ maintenance on all scoped resources and RBAC enabled us to bring ownership of IAM to critical data from to our IDM team from DBAs. I like SDM's play to expand PAM to all access control because why not - puts us on the path to password-less/ zero trust. The friendly, quick, and knowledgable overall support from their support org is world-class. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** I'd like to see a cloud-based/ SASE play to offload gateway/ relay management from the customer. IdPs like Okta are acquiring/building similar access control tech and it could entice large enterprises to use that tech for financial and tech consolidation/ simplification reasons. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Bringing modern security practice to legacy infrastructure, centralizing access to a hybrid environment, investing time/money/people to make sure customers are actually successful with implementation ### 15. StrongDM - great solution with simple rollout **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shelley D. | Big Data SW Program leader, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 19, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Onboarding and rollout were so quick. We onboarded over 300 employees in just one week. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Nothing major to consider as a disadvantage. We've managed to overcome every challenge with the StrongDM team eager to assist. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Per audit requirements, we were forced to manage and control users' access to production systems. StrongDM offers an easy way to do it. ### 16. Strong and easy access tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dotan C. | CloudOps, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Working very fast, SSO integration, agentless tools. Replace all key pairs and unmanaged infrastructure. K8S access and ssh are made easy with StronDM, great support! **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Need to create automation and scripts to register instances. No autodiscovery and cloud visibility. Agent stability issues. Some options are only supported via API **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Access control to our instance fleet with SSO integration ### 17. Incredible product with an incredible team behind it! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** When we started evaluating access control tools, strongDM quickly became our top choice because of the tool's maturity, and we felt like the capabilities were unmatched when compared with alternatives. As a result, we hit our access control and monitoring goals in half the time we estimated initially! **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** It can be a single point of failure, but despite the tool being stable, strongDM is very open about planning for redundancy and having a contingency plan. We also ran across some bugs with additional tools provided by strongDM during our implementation, but they were incredibly receptive and quick regarding fixes! **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Right now, we have several concerns about access and controls since we're part of a fully remote company. StrongDM helps give us a lot of piece of mind and allows us to regulate and introspect access to our critical systems deeply. ### 18. Easy access control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 11, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** As an organisation access control on the SaaS platform is challenging.Given that there are instance were the access levels have to be modified to a higher level, strong DM's on demand access control makes it simple **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** While the on demand access part is very simple but the entire implementation if simple would make it easier. For someone with no knowledge on networks aspect, the StrongDM setup may need help from the IT admin team **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a SaaS company, the access had to be controlled to a non-admin level but there would be instances were the internal teams would require access, these access had to be in a controlled yet simple way and easily traceable, which Strong DM has helped. ### 19. Super easy to setup and use VPN alternative - our internal users love it! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Strongdm is super easy to set up - we set it up ourselves for AWS and GCP within less then a day. Users love the simplicity of signing up and connecting to internal resources without the hassles of a legacy VPN. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Nothing substantial really. It would be great to add support for pulumi for IaC (currently only terraform supported). **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Secure, auditable, simple cloud-agnostic access management (VPN-alternative) to private cloud resources such as postgres databases. This enables engineers and data analysts to access data without worrying too much about the details of the underlying infrastructure or network topology. ### 20. Easy and secure access to cloud resources **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew L. | DevOps/SysAdmin, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** I like that StrongDM makes it easy for our users to securely access cloud resources without needing a separate VPN. We can provide SSH access to instances, access to databases, and even dashboards for tools that we don't want to make publicly available. Additionally, StrongDM allows us granular control over the resources that individual users have access to. StrongDM support is also fantastic. Any time we have had issues, they have been able to get us a resolution faster than I would have expected. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** There isn't anything that I dislike about strongDM. We have been a customer for several years now and have seen the product continually improve throughout the time we've used it. I can't wait to see what they come up with next. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We brought in strongDM so that we could easily provide our users access to cloud resources without needing to set up a VPN and peer all of our VPCs together. Using strongDM allows users to log into a single service and have access to resources spread across multiple accounts. ### 21. Experience with strongDM. They are very knowledgeable about identity and access management. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Juan Bautista J. | Security engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** They are very useful with Kubernetes Kubeclt access; Database access does not come with out-of-the-box access management **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** I have not seen a downfall yet , they were able to handle all our request so far **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a lot of Database with no user unique name, and we were able to use okta and strongDM to handle the problem ### 22. A product which works with great customer support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** As described in the title, their product works! It works as expected - no magic, or wasted hours. Better than that, their customer support was there with us all the time, and our success was their priority. Their onboarding process is great! **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Since the beginning of our relationship, which was great, we had not hit any problems. We had scheduled meetings to check our progress and sessions that could be used to provide feedback or ask for help. We felt they were there for us if we needed them. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** StrondDM helped our developers to have access to resources "behind the iron curtain" - no public access, safely and easily. Their systray application is a great differential. Developers just need to click and chose what they want to have access to. You are able to audit access. Finally, they integrate with your IdP of choice, in our case OKTA and support SCIM. ### 23. Perfect solution for secure access to cloud resources **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joel F. | CTO / Co-founder, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 10, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** What do I like best can easily be summed up by sayng "it just works". Since we initially on boarded with StrongDM the solution has worked for us. As with anything there have been minor hiccups but their support team is quick to email or hop on a zoom and resolve these hiccups. It's been easy enough for all of our teams, even the less techinical ones, to use without the need for significant training. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** There is not much now that I dislike besides the color scheme. In the past, they would release new features and not let us know about them or how they could be used to solve new issues. This has gotten better as we now have more and more contact with our CSM. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We found StrongDM when we were starting down our compliance path, starting with SOC 2 Type II compliance. StrongDM helped us protect our cloud resources with private networks but still allows employees to connect to these resources when necessary. Plus it adds all the necessary audit trails. ### 24. Great access management **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Patrick G. | Devops Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 08, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Strongdm is a setup and forget about it solution as it just works. The terraform provider as well as okta provisioning mean that the team responsible for maintaning datasources doesn't have to do any manual work. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** I have no complaints about strongdm at all. The pricing isn't free so that may be my biggest complaint. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Access control and auditing access to data sources, who accessed what data at what time and what exactly did they do? This is huge for us when it comes to an audit trail. ### 25. StrongDM is a swiss knife for server infrastructure **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex S. | H, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** There is no need in using VPN for accessing server infrastructure. It's all in-one: SSH, RDP, PSQL, VNC etc. Different access levels for different groups of staff. Audit logs for everything! We love it!)) **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** In theory it's a single point of failure - SPF. But it works pretty stable and I don't remember any work interruption in past few months. We're waiting the support of Android and iOS. Hopefully - they will be supported soon **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** No more VPNs for accessing server infrastructure! Access permissions for different groups of staff and audit logs - solve security issues for our Team. ### 26. Very nice tool for Zero Trust **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** It helped us to solve many issues and even get rid of a horrible VPN we had. Now all our DB access is audited and automized. It was pretty easy to implement and we barely had issues since then. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** It is very expensive, the service is very robust but still I don't see a scenario in wich a small - mid size company can allow to invest so much money in this tool. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows us to control the access to all our productive and non-productive databases and we can also control who and when acesses to the production databases via allowance procedure. It helped us to get rid of the VPN we had before wich was high maintenance, unstable and old. ### 27. Easy and secure unified access control **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sean V. | DevOps Engineer **Reviewed Date:** June 09, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** strongDM unified our access methods across a variety of production instances, gave us more granular control over that access, and simplified the process for the dev team. It's rare to see a product that improves security and usability at the same time. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** It's possible to go off the rails in specific ways. We mistagged our instances early on and ran into some filtering issues. The strongDM team has been excellent at adding features at our request and addressing these usability issues quickly, though. The core of their offering is solid, and any issues we had around the outside were easy to fix. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our infrastructure includes deployments across hybrid, public, and private cloud. Using strongDM allows our entire team to log into all of our environments in the same way, and allows us to grant just in time access to an on-call developer. ### 28. Great support and awesome tool for remote access **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nikita A. | Site Reliability Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Great support and excellent tool for remote access Good UI Faster response Easier to group users and datasources Tagging feature is great very rare outages reported **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Sometimes we face latency issues which tend to slow down the requests for pulling out queries, especially with certain database clients, there is a huge amount of latency **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing databases across the entire org, we don't have to share master credentials with all users, instead we create users on the database and assign them access through SDM ### 29. Great product, very helpful team and great support. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** The product is great, we want to take out our VPN and go to a ZeroTrust strategy and StrongDM help us with this topic. Also, the support while deploying the solution and in all the later steps was great and the follow-up meetings with us were helpful to solver the remaining issues. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** In general, everything was OK. maybe some other more advanced features in the platform, or some changes in the UI to manage roles and users easily. But it's a tool that provides what you want so... **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** In a full-remote company, we need to get rid of the typical network infrastructure and move to a Zero-Trust architecture. StrongDM helped us to take out the VPN and be able to audit and identify our users to align to this strategy ### 30. Impressed with strongDM's ease of use and east of implementation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nick S. | Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 10, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** With SSO and SCIM configured, using SDM is now seamless. It didn't take long for the tool to insert itself into our workflows. As well the Terraform provisioner has been a nice touch. It is helpful to manage some of the static portions of the StrongDM setup in Terraform blocks. Not every company/tool provides a provisioner. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** strongDM not having a public roadmap and refusing to publish one when asked was a bit of a downside. Their case managers are forthcoming with details, but it is on the implementing team to communicate upcoming strongDM features to the rest of their companies without a public roadmap to refer to. **Recommendations to others considering StrongDM:** On its surface, StrongDM is simple and easy to use, this is great for the end-user. But it also doesn't hide its extensibility. Our team has taken advantage of the various APKs, the Terraform provisioner, and deeper functionality of the CLI to build layers on top of SDM. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Three main use cases: Secure and easy daily-driver access to cloud infrastructure for certain teams. Empowering developer teams to handle 24/7 emergency alerts related to their applications. Ad-hoc, auditable, temporary access requested with approval through our tools. Jira, Slack. ### 31. Minimal Overhead, Maximum Value **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Darrell P. | Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 22, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** StrongDM has minimal overhead to run. Setting up in k8s is a breeze, and has a boilerplate template in the documentation with minimal configuration needed. We honestly didn't need to compare to the competion because how quick it was to install and configure. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Not much. There are a lot of items you can configure in their UI, which can be confusing at first. StrongDM has excellent documentation and has been making some improvements here. **Recommendations to others considering StrongDM:** Give it a try. It's pretty easy to see the value just by setting it up. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** As an administrator and daily user, I can easily say it has made my daily work much more manageable. We have fantastic feedback from our dev team as well. Time spent connecting to private resources and using traditional methods of authentication has dropped, and more time is spent on the actual work :) ### 32. Wonderful product, wonderful team. Makes my work easier and our company's security posture stronger. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kim L. | Public Speaker, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Having StrongDM makes access control and audits a breeze. I get instant visibility into who is accessing my system and what they are doing. I can quickly grant and revoke access to different sources and it is all controlled in one interface. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** We host StrongDM ourselves and we hold onto logs ourselves as well. It's a little cumbersome to parse through those logs afterward. Certain logs like DB queries are better and we wrote a script to understand what is happening but the server actions recording logs are cryptic. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Access control and audit trails are the largest benefits I see. At first, it was used for our compliance + IT team to have dynamic fine-grained access control but now we are also expanding it to use for other departments to access data too. ### 33. StrongDM has made extremely high toil tasks like database and kubernetes access management a breeze **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Trevor C. | Site Reliability Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** By far the most helpful for us is the database and access management features, this is StrongDM's bread and butter. We currently use StrongDM for database access management, kubernetes access management, and SSH monitoring. We are currently exploring the other features offered like Secret Stores. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** The only thing that I really disliked at first was the user management, but StrongDM listened to their users and made huge updates over the past year in this area and it's now a breeze. Another feature would be a way to search through activity logging via the admin ui, this is easily done via the cli and by piping your logs to stdout but an in admin ui log search would be very useful. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** The main problem is the nightmare that managing database authentication is across a team of engineers. Prior to StrongDM we were managing users directly in postgres/mysql and this can be a full time job depending on how many databases you manage. StrongDM has now made this headache of a task into a breeze. ### 34. StrongDM makes setting up new engineers with database access EASY! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 27, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Onboarding new engineers with databases takes 5 minutes. Update and offboarding is instant. Also audit logs of all commands executed! **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** There's minor issues here and there but overall no major dislikes. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** StrongDM provides centralized access to private resources simplifying management while providing fine-grained access controls and auditability. ### 35. Great Product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 21, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** The product is easy to use and the install is straight forward. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Can use some automation when it comes to deployment of gateways and relays. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Backend access to developers along with very clear logging which helps with compliance. ### 36. strongDM to the rescue **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dmitriy R. | DevOps, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 04, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** What do you like best? Where to begin... ease of onboarding/offboarding users. Audit of any shenanigans that those users try to execute. The set-and-forget process of temporary elevation of permissions/resources. Quick support when encountering any issues (hear this, some wait-three-days-for-reply companies that shall remain unnamed). And much more! **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** With "tighter integrations with Okta and Azure AD," the company is still working out all the kinks to integrate with Google suite groups. I understand that that is not an easy task, and the integrations will soon come out. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** What brought us to StrongDM is a need for detailed audit and access control to all Databases, internal website endpoints, Kubernetes, and AWS resources. StrongDM provides us with all these capabilities and more. ### 37. Great tool for simplifying, standardizing, and controlling access **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 11, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** * The tool is easy to configure - both UI and IAC are well-designed * End users can easily see what they have access to, and there's good documentation on how to use it. * Fantastic support. Very responsive and helpful. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Some of the integrations (databases, SSH, K8s) can unsurprisingly work a bit differently from one another and require custom scripting to work with developer tooling. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need to provide access for hundreds of users to thousands of resources in a way that is easy to scale, secure, and auditable. It also has to reflect our access requirements and only provide the access a user needs. ### 38. Simple and powerful; one of those tools that both Admins and Clients both like to use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ken C. | Site Reliability Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** From the Admin side, it's intuitive and expansive. It's so nice to have a single pane of glass to manage different access to resources; but a killer feature is granting temporary access. As teams change, people go on-call, or various other changes happen, roles can be dynamically changed and updated- all autonomously after rules are established. This minimizes overhead, greases the wheels and gets developers, auditors, directors; whoever the right access they need every time without having to step in. In addition, I appreciate that SDM has expanded so much since we began using them a few years back. It seems like they are always looking for new services to implement and work with; making SDM an absolute integral part of our infrastructure. I appreciate their human-centric design as well; no complex (specific) jargon; clear labels, and excellent documentation and Github repo for nontraditional deployments. Finally; I appreciate the elegance of this solution. It's a simple solution to a complex problem. The Gateways/Relays are straightforward in how they do what they do. Understanding the internals of something is big; it's not necessarily a black box-- so troubleshooting and extension becomes easy and intuitive. From a client perspective, it's incredibly easy to understand and jump between different resources with minimal training. Always fantastic when a userbase is easy to pick up a new tool and use it without question. Minimizes our overhead, increases security, and simply works. This is the rare exception where increasing security at the end-user level actually improves the user experience. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Audit log retrieval / search could be a little bit more intuitive. A solution was outlined to us (created by SDM) to output over to our log aggregator, which helps immensely-- but it could be more straightforward. **Recommendations to others considering StrongDM:** The cost to benefit ratio here is off the chart. It's easy to set up, the support team has been very responsive, and frankly, it's easy to troubleshoot outside of support. The application is easy to admin, and it's one of the few tools that our end-users actually like to use and ask to integrate further. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're using SSO tools that mainly give FE access; but configuring these tools individually for backend access is much more of a challenge (and on some services, tiered). Using this product allows us to speed up Onboarding, Access Management, and reduces management overhead drastically. Being able to link from an SSO provider all the way down to an IAM role for a specific resource (or dynamic resources based off of tags), while having a FULL audit trail is incredible. Another key feature that we appreciate about SDM is that we can automatically escalate privileges based on on-call schedules. This ensures that we can follow an 'access level of least privilege, not to mention does away with hanging permissions that may have been manually adjusted. We are able to give more granular access to more people by using StrongDM; speeding up development, debugging, and incident response. ### 39. StrongDM allows for a secure but rapid rollout of new services **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Real Estate | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 07, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** As we build, test, roll out, and sometimes roll back various new products and services, StrongDM lets us distribute connectivity to our developers quickly **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** I'd like to see more dynamic local network DNS configuration **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** fast, managed service access/restriction ### 40. simple, seamless, reliable **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** simplicity of use & reliability of connection **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** nothing I've experienced is negative, but I can't speak to specifics of internals or org-wide set-up process **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** reliable secure remote connections (especially notable when changing locations or travelling), remote connections without credential sharing for team ### 41. Colby strongdm review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Simple pricing model. Good user experience. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** The local app could benefit from a search function. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's making our remote access more secure while also being a better user experience. ### 42. strongDM is a must have partner if innovation is your thing! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steeve B. | Data Infrastructure Engineering Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** It has helped us avoid the need to manage database usernames and passwords for routine access; Helped answer questions like Who, When, What, and Where on a Splunk Dashboard; Automating onboarding/off-boarding, and a simplified manager approval process thanks to slack integrations. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** I am honestly struggling to find anything to improve on. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Getting access to data was not trivial. It was time consuming for both DBAs and Engineers. Thanks to strongDM we were able to achieve better operational efficiency. ### 43. Great Service, Great Support **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** SDM makes it easy to provide our engineers with secure and observable access to our data services. Our onboarding process is even more effective, as we are able to onboard team members to our services faster and with no intervention. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Documentation can be slightly lacking sometimes, but the SDM team is quick to provide the guidance needed or update the docs. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** SDM provides our teams with affordable Zero Trust access to our Databases and servers. They also have features that we plan to implement soon, like automating approved access to services for engineers that are on-call for troubleshooting during incidents. ### 44. Extremely useful for proxying access to our sensitive systems **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 07, 2021 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** We're currently utilizing StrongDM for proxying access into the management interfaces for our most sensitive systems. The product works very well for this purpose for us. We add the servers, add the users, create the roles and assign the servers. That's it. Then, once it's completed, it's even faster to offboard and onboard new users. One of our DBAs is leaving shortly and we can just remove him from the group to disable all of his access. Then, once his replacement is hired, we can add the new user and put them in the group. They'll be allocated all of their required roles. The audit functions are also very helpful to preserve the actual tasks that were completed while the user was logged in. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** My two biggest criticisms is that I can't currently proxy websites that utilize our SSO environment (which I think is on their roadmap) and it doesn't currently support our password management system. That system is a bit older so I understand the decision. Also, they've been adding support for additional password management systems over time. That will allow us to have it check out credentials at the time of login rather than having to hard code them in. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Trying to limit access to certain systems based on network addresses, VPNs, etc. was somewhat onerous. Also, unless you're wanting to create many different custom VPNs, it's a bit of a one size fits all approach, giving more access to more users than necessary. This allows us to very precisely assign specific users to specific systems. It also allows for timed assignments, so we can grant temporary access that expires without having to remember to remove it later. StrongDM also preserves data from the session in the event that we need to go back and track down an issue. ### 45. strongDM Makes us More Secure **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2021 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** We've had a great time with the team at strongDM. The support has been fantastic, and the setup a breeze. Whenever we have a question, the support team is quick to respond and always extremely helpful. So far, we are only using the database connections but plan on leveraging more of their platform soon. We look forward to hopefully, one day, getting rid of our VPN with the help of strongDM! **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** While the support has been great, I would have loved a non-email option for getting a hold of the support team. Many vendors now utilize Slack across different organizations, and I would have loved to see strongDM do something similar. This is a nitpick, but I would like to see more robust documentation around the Terraform provider. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** strongDM is helping us practice safer and more secure ways to connect to our RDS instances. ### 46. Great!, Zero Trust Infrastructure Access Tool. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** * Auditing Capabilities are top-notch. * Great API Support , which helps us to develop tools for Faster Access Management & automate things over StrongDM. * Replaces Traditional VPN. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** * Nothing to dislike about StrongDM. It's a great tool **Recommendations to others considering StrongDM:** If you are looking for a tool with significant auditing & ease of infrastructure access than StrongDM is way to go! **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** * Infrastructure Access Mangement * Granular Level Auditing * Helping us become a Zero Trust Company. * Developer Productivity is improved a lot. ### 47. Audited access control for all **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 03, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** Nearly instant-on access control for all major infrastructure resources. Everything is auditable - you know who had access and when and what they did. Can be set up with no inbound firewall holes if needed. Continually improved. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Website access control can only be used with some kinds of authentication. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Access control; Compliance; Auditability of access; Removal of dependency on VPN ### 48. Team members who are friendly, dedicated, and professional. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 27, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** StrongDM team is very responsive to our needs. They respond almost immediately if we have a problem or a question. In addition to monthly meetings, we have cases follow-up meetings as well. It's a friendly and pleasant team. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** Since StrongDM is a growing company, it's difficult to meet all the needs of every customer. There are times when we have a special request, but in those cases, the team immediately opens a feature request and updates us on the progress. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using StrongDM solutions, we can gain centralized access to our resources and audit the actions of end-users. ### 49. SDM provides a seamless experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Afif M. | Site reliability engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2022 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** StrongDM makes it incredibly easy for me to work in various K8 clusters in various environments. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** So far, the product delivers the marketed solution as expected **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our engineering organization no longer needs to access bastions with a script. Additionally we have more control over access to the bastions ### 50. SDM packs a big punch for its small size **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeffrey L. | D, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 07, 2021 **What do you like best about StrongDM?** The ease of use for both infrastructure engineering, SRE, software engineers, as well as non-technical operators. I can have Customer Success work with reporting databases without a technical mess of getting them from A to B. **What do you dislike about StrongDM?** The UI. It's simplistic and gets overly crowded. We had one engineer lose 7 hours trying to _find_ the taskbar icon in dark mode. He ended up reinstalling MacOS before we pointed out that it's that grey blob on a grey background between two icons. **What problems is StrongDM solving and how is that benefiting you?** Complex access control via stunnel and VPNs. We have dozens of cloud accounts and to be able to nimbly connect to multiple resources across multiple accounts and clouds is amazing. ## StrongDM Discussions - [What does strongDM do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-strongdm-do) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Is strongDM a VPN?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-strongdm-a-vpn) - 1 comment - [What does strongDM do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/strongdm-what-does-strongdm-do) - 1 comment - [View StrongDM pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/strongdm/reviews?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-11+21%3A57%3A38+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=35284fc4-aa35-4dae-8e17-9106f884a5b5&secure%5Btoken%5D=304e2605265f7f8c965ad5a8582691c5ca7102a9048af342c51d15ae196709aa&format=llm_user) ## StrongDM Integrations - [Couchbase](https://www.g2.com/products/couchbase/reviews) - [Kubernetes](https://www.g2.com/products/kubernetes/reviews) - [Microsoft Entra ID](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-entra-id/reviews) ## StrongDM Features **Administration** - Policy, User, and Role Management - Approval Workflows - Automated Provisioning - Bulk Changes - Centralized Management - Self-Service Access Requests **Functionality** - User provisioning - Password manager - Single Sign-on - Enforces policies - Authentication - Multi-factor authentication **Functionality** - Multi-Factor Authentication - Single Sign-On - BYOD support - Password Vault - Centralized management - Role-based security - Live notifications - Live session recording & playback - Hide passwords - Temporary, time-limited privilege ** Type** - On-premises solution - Cloud-solution **Monitoring** - Audit Logging - Activity Logging - Anomaly Detection ** Reporting** - Tracking - Reporting - Access & Permission Change Reporting - Compliance & Audit Trail Export **Reporting** - Audit log - Reporting **Authentication & Authorization - Identity and Access Management (IAM)** - Adaptive & Contextual Access Control **Administration & Governance - Identity and Access Management (IAM)** - Identity Lifecycle Management - Self‑Service Account Management **Generative AI - Identity and Access Management (IAM)** - AI‑Driven Access Anomaly Detection - Automated Policy Tuning - Predictive Role Recommendations ## Top StrongDM Alternatives - [JumpCloud](https://www.g2.com/products/jumpcloud/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (3,887 reviews) - [Teleport](https://www.g2.com/products/teleport/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (109 reviews) - [Microsoft Entra ID](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-entra-id/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (872 reviews)