Comparing Centrify Express to Other Free Active Directory Integration Tools

Sorting through claims regarding the features and benefits of various freely available Active Directory integration solutons — ours included — can be time-consuming and confusing. Here are some resources we think will be worth your time in examining:

What Makes Centrify Express Unique?

Some vendors provide Active Directory plugins for their operating systems, and free open source toolkits are also available. Centrify Express offers more functionality and more to upgrade to when compared to other free offerings. Here is what puts Centrify Express far ahead of those other offerings:

• Enterprise-Class Reliability. Centrify Express is a subset of the same technology that our 4000+ enterprise customers currently have in production on hundreds of thousands of servers. You get the benefit of our enterprise-hardened technology, frequent updates and best practices acquired through years of real-world customer experience.
• Broad Platform Coverage. Centrify Express is not a point solution for a single operating systems, but covers all of the the mostly widely deployed versions of UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X.
• Deep Upgrade Options. With the full Centrify Suite you can get even broader platform cover — 300+ versions of UNIX, Linux and Mac — and functionality that goes well beyond authentication: granular access control with our patented Zone technology, Group Policy enforcement, role-based authorization and privilege management, user-level auditing, server isolation, encryption of data-in-motion, and application SSO, to name a few of the capabilities you can upgrade to. See Which Centrify Suite Edition is Right for You? to begin exploring the products and capabilities of the full Centrify Suite.
• Ease of Upgrade. Because Centrify Express is a subset of our enterprise software, you have a simple license-key upgrade path to unlock our advanced features. Additional modules you may need (for example, for Active Directory single sign-on for SAP) have been built by the same engineering team to seamlessly snap into our core Centrify agent. There's no need to uninstall or reconfigure anything, or to integrate other products with different architectures. Keeping current with future releases is also easy: DirectManage Express can check the Centrify website for new releases and upgrade existing systems with the latest version.
• Ease of Deployment & Management. No other solution offers a centralized console like Centrify DirectManage Express for automated discovery, analysis, deployment and upgrade, plus remote single sign-on and local account management.
• Complementary Productivity Tools. You also get free packaged and tested versions of OpenSSH, PuTTY and Samba that have been enhanced to work seamlessly on DirectControl-managed systems. This helps you be more productive faster with our solutions.
• Complementary Cloud Security Solutions. Centrify Cloud Tools provide packaged Amazon and RightScale solutions to help you securely migrate to the cloud.
• Complementary Monitoring and Reporting Solution. Centrify Insight is a free monitoring and reporting tool that helps you identify and analyze authentication, authorization and other events taking place on the UNIX, Linux and Mac systems managed by Centrify Suite or Centrify Suite Express.
• Attention to Detail. Centrify Express cares about the little nits that can drive users crazy or cause needless loss of productivity — such as not making you type your domain name every time you login using your Active Directory credentials, or not supporting recent versions of Samba.
• Rich Set of Resources. Our Centrify Express Community features more than just the peer support forums; you'll also have access to a wealth of how-to videos, documentation, best practice guides and more to help you be even more successful.

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A Reviewer's Checklist Template All of the freely available Active Directory integration solutions share one goal: to enable non-Windows systems to join an Active Directory domain so that users can login using their Windows credentials. But other factors distinguish these solutions, including their ease of deployment, ease of use for end-users, integration with other tools, and upgrade options. Here's a checklist of the features that we suggest you compare before choosing a solution. In the checklist template, you can write the names of the other products you are comparing in the two blank columns on the right of the grid. Also see the expert analysis of the most commonly available solutions below.

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Expert Analysis: Comparing Free Active Directory Solutions

Centrify Express, Likewise Open and Windbind are all freely available Active Directory integration solutions for non-Windows systems. How easy are they to install and maintain? Are there any significant differences in functionalty? How well do they integrate with commonly used Open Source tools such as OpenSSH and Samba? The only way to conclusively answer these questions for yourself is to try all three. But if you'd like the benefit of expert insight, check out this detailed and methodical analysis conducted by Rodney Ruddock of Interop Systems:

Comparing Free Active Directory Integration Offerings for Linux Systems By Rodney Ruddock, Interop Systems Comparison study sponsored by Centrify

Check out more independent third-party reviews of Centrify Express vs. Likewise Open and other Active Directory interoperability solutions.