# Symantec SiteMinder Reviews **Vendor:** Broadcom **Category:** [Single Sign-On (SSO) Solutions](https://www.g2.com/categories/single-sign-on-sso) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 24 ## About Symantec SiteMinder Symantec SiteMinder is designed to secure the modern enterprise through a unified access management platform that applies the appropriate authentication mechanism to positively identify users; provides single sign-on and identity federation for seamless access to any application; enforces granular security policies to stop unauthorized access to sensitive resources; and monitors and manages the entire user session to prevent session hijacking. ## Symantec SiteMinder Reviews ### 1. Secured and seamless authentication-Symantec SiteMinder **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Priyanka R. | Software Engineer, Business Supplies and Equipment, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2021 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** I like the authentication mechanism using security codes that keeps changing every few seconds which helps in easy access to application. It applies for cloud and mobile apps as well. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** There is no feature that I dislike about the Symantec SiteMinder as such **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** If you are looking for a platform that would manage all the authentication and authorization aspects of a application or software seamlessly, then you can go for it blindly. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Authorization and authentication for any application is usually tedious. Symantec SiteMinder solves the problem by providing us the robust solution. It optimises the app performance as well. ### 2. Easy to use Federated SSO **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2016 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Users are easy to manage. Functionality is as expected. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Permissions can be a little difficult with few tenant admins **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** ability to lessen number of passwords users have to memorize and/or be managed by administration ### 3. Best Autehntication software **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Satish S. | Sr Middleware Expert, Telecommunications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2015 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** CA technologies cam up with a wonderful product for authentication, authorization and accounting, which is the siteminder. Its rock stable and no issues found at any point of time. After the upgrade from 6.0 to 12.0 we observed enormous improvement in the performance and the software is much stable as compared to other competitors in the market. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Not only me, anyone would first say about what they dislike about CA siteminder is the cost. The cost of software and the cost of setup, and the cost for the support hit sky during the implementation phase. we worked on so many products but this one crossed others a par in terms of cost. Even the support is very limited and the documentation is less for this product. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** if you are looking for rock solid authentication software, please go with CA siteminder. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used this software for web authentication for online users. We even configured the single sign on with this software. performance was the best thing we liked. ### 4. My office security sign on way **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2016 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Simple user interface , yet powerful security fatues **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** not much to dislike, we use it mainly to log into company network **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** enterprisewide user logon ### 5. SiteMinder - The Best of the Best **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Terence C. | SSO Architect/Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** SiteMinder simply does exactly what CA says it can do and that is to provide a solid, reliable, robust solution for Single Sign-On, Web Access Control, Identity Federation. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** I have no dislikes. Any feature deemed deficient by CA's clients/customers is addressed through improved product, bug fixes, customized solutions. There are very few use cases the "out of the box" product is unable to achieve. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** Take the time to understand your goals for the enterprise; plan for training; utilize in-house expertise and CA Support; establish a solution specification that includes requirements, integration, implementation and maintenance. Most environments have existing critical apps with Proprietary authentication, consider the cost to SSO enable old apps; factor in additional time/delays for troubleshooting complex custom web applications; get lots of performance testing feedback to tune your solution to. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** SSO on a global scale can be a challenge. So many factors need to be clearly understood. SiteMinder has always improved the time-to-market for web applications requiring SSO, Web Access Management, Integration with the Windows desktop, multi-factor authentication or Identity Federation, SiteMinder is the logical direction for large enterprises, Federal, State and local govts. Its features are our benefits, realized. ### 6. CA SiteMinder - Excellent product from CA Technologies **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gagan Deep S. | Senior Information Security Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 25, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Single Sign-On, Federation Services (That comes along with Siteminder R12 Version). SiteMinder able to authenticate and authorize using various LDAP Directories and Databases. IPCheck and SmWalker are some of the features that are very helpful. They are not only easy to setup but works well with other integrated components as well. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Admin GUI for Siteminder R12 version is bit slow. CA support should look into this and come up with something better. Nothing much to dislike as quality of product (CA Siteminder) is very good **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** CA Siteminder is much better than other existing SSO products available in the market. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Upgrading Siteminder R6 to R12. Migration from existing R6 version to Siteminder newer version was done with lot of ease. One benefit I would like to mention is that siteminder r12 comes up with integration federation services. so we migrated our existing Oracle Identity Federation setup to Siteminder R12 Federation services. ### 7. CA Siteminder: Enterprise Security Layer showing off ease of integration, modularity, performance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniele R. | Senior Security Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 15, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** CA Siteminder boasts flexibility of configuration as well as architecture modularity which are key to a successful integration in enterprise environments. SSO features, Federation capabilities and standard RFC implementations get the product in the leader quadrant for Access Management and Web Security **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** CA Siteminder, from version 12 on, has replaced its GUI (applet-style) into a web-gui: unfortunately, even though the choice has been the right one, the web-gui implementation is not, let's say, web2.0-wise. Poor implementation and no use of Ajax capabilites bring more pain in configuring Siteminder nowadays. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** If you need to secure a medium-big company web-tier, this is the product with a level of solid background, modularity and granularity needed in such environments. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Especially Enterprise Companies' architectures, giving the customer a solid and flexible security layer upon their new as well as legacy applications, intranet and internet. ### 8. Amazing Single-sign-on and Federation product. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Very good architecture that scales for very high volume. Intuitive user interface (It had issues when they released R12 but it has since improved substantially). Supports strong authentication like RSA, ArcotID, etc. Can integrate with most Directories and Databases out of the box. Agents for most of the web servers, application servers, SharePoint, Peoplesoft, SAP, secure proxy server, etc. High quality 24/7 Support -- quite responsive. Widely used. A market leading product. Relatively easy to learn. A lot of new features are being added to latest versions to support mobile, social, agent less solutions, for Web service/ SOA support, etc. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** User Interface can be improved for better readability. Tighter integration with CA Directory (like Advanced AD Integration would be nice to have). Federation component has scope for improvement. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** Go for it! **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Authentication, Authorization, Agent based and Federation based single sign on, Auditing for web applications hosted within the organization and business partners in the cloud. ### 9. Siteminder Federation Review **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex T. | Identity and Access Management Engineer, Human Resources, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Very nicely integrated with current siteminder implementations. Configuration of partners and outgoing federations is simple and straight forward. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Management and alerting of certificates is a bit cumbersome, some saml spec items that are marked optional are required making some implementations more complicated. Implementing SP initiated federations requires alot of custom work and interim pages , wish this was more out of the box to implement. Support could be a bit more streamlined , we waited days for analysis of a problem only to be told it was undetermined cause.. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** if you already use siteminder its a no brainer, if you use other products already for reverse proxy you might want to look at other options. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Giving clients a seamless way to log into our products and reduce the amount of password resets. The product has accomplished this and more . ### 10. Flexibility for the Business **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bruce T. | Chief Technology Officer **Reviewed Date:** June 29, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** One of the best features of Siteminder is the ability to provide custom interfaces and services to allow for increase integration and flexibility of the model to adapt to business rules. We have used this to provide adaptive access management capability to back end systems. Additionally the product is designed for certification and allows for extensible authentication capabilities. The EAL Rating provides an assurance to the end users and the enterprise that security is built in by design and that it meets the requirements of secure government transactions. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** A poor implement and coding of a BLTH (Business Logic Task Handlers) can lock the system into a loop. There is little process flow and boundary checking conditions to stop this occurring. Ensure that you have as strong testing regime and separate test instances. There should be a greater range of web based layouts and templates available and an improved ability to customise the user and administration interface for an end client. The user interface (while it can be branded) is not easy to do and required strong developer effort. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** Ensure that a separate test environment is setup and reproduces the business issues to allow for controlled change management. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Implementation of Attribute Based Access Control in a pan-enterprise environment to allow for business process rule management of access to information resources. The flexibility of Siteminder and the ability to extend its functionality allowed us to develop a full ABAC implementation for a major client and its partners. ### 11. Review of CA SiteMinder **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Phillip C. | CxO, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** SiteMinder is the most widely deployed solution. It allows for a seamless user experience and is relatively straightforward to implement. Directory Chaining (a single security policy can connect an application when the user community is spread across multiple directories) is of specific use to us. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** This is not a specific problem with SiteMinder but when an SSO solution is not well architected it can lead to some disjointed behaviors. This can create extra support calls from users. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** We did an assessment of multiple companies offerings. I suggest any company should do the same. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed Seamless Single Sign-On for multiple systems & Web applications. That's what we were able to accomplish. ### 12. Secure access provided the easy way **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tapan J. | Associate Analytics Director at GroupM, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 17, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** It combines the power of a reliable, identity federated single sign-on solution with the benefits of a cloud-based service with just one set of credentials.In addition, end users receive a more convenient single sign on experience that is consistent with how they access applications within their organization’s domain. Even better, CA SSO allows visitors to use social media credentials like Facebook, Google or LinkedIn for a single login, single logoff experience with reliable federated SSO of identity attributes. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** There is nothing to dislike about the CA SSO service. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** It provides a comprehensive identity and access management platform that enables your organization to: 1) Securely deliver new online services quickly. 2) Enable secure collaboration among employees and partners. 3) Reduce the cost of security and compliance management. 4) Protect key assets from insider threats and external attacks. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** CA SSO lets your IT organization control single sign on and authorization to applications whether in a cloud-based federation hub, a partner-hosted application or other on-premise applications within your own organization. ### 13. Wouldn't recommend unless you have very limited use cases **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** - Utilization of Web Agents for AuthN/AuthZ within a single domain is relatively easy. - Security zones within a single domain still allows separation of SSO between different application groups. - Can handle a large number of users without requiring a huge amount of resources on the server. - Lots of out of the box features for directing users around during/after authentication and/or authorization. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** - Certificate based authentication does not perform full path validation or key usage checks. So if you are big on smart cards, this is definitely something to consider as it does not meet authentication standards for higher level of access. - Cookie Provider does not enforce timeouts properly across multiple domains (essentially breaks SSO after a user times out to the application). It also interferes with AJAX / other functions (can break Cognos reports as well). - Admin UI is horribly slow - Lack of proper identity mapping between multiple user directories. (a) Application objects cannot have identity mapping applied individually, only globally. (b) No mapping for Federation to generate assertions based on attributes from multiple user stores. (c) Unable to create a single "view" of a user to generate responses and authorization decisions. - Unstable with known bugs that cause Policy Server to crash. - Default header response to Web Agents return multi-valued LDAP attributes as a ( ^ ) separated string instead of separate headers. - Federation management is just bad....no other way to put it. Disjointed, clunky, and requires clicking through multiple steps for a simple Federation. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** If you have complex requirements you will find many things missing when comparing to other big-name WAM products. While it 'can get the job done' in a complex environment, it's far from straight-forward and lacks many features. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** SSO across multiple applications, domains, and federated partners. ### 14. User Friendly Identity Management Solution **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** CA Siteminder provides majority of products on identity and access management space which is flexible across environment. Way user interface transition from applet to web based application is best way to give insignt of product instead of legacy technology feel. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Siteminder can provide more documentation about customize out of the box functionality which may lead to another extend of product name and brand name spread across and probably more online training material may take more customers towards product feature. This kind of training make aware of technology people aware of what siteminder capable of **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** Better documentation on customize product features and web service authentication will be better. Same time if there are anything kind of demo installers that will add more advantages to product visibility to crowd. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am handling Access Management with Federation component (both IDP and SP) ### 15. Excellent for Access Management and SSO **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lokesh Kumar G. | Senior IT Analyst, Hospital & Health Care, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Ease of administration, simple User Interface, very stable too **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** No user provisioning feature is there, CA product Support is not good. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** It is worthy of it, if you want a simple way of managing the access control. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Single Sign On, Authentication mechanisms, Access Control ### 16. Best Identity and Access Management product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Ease of use and excellent technical support. Debugging an issue by using trace logs/ access/error logs is super easy. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** going through the logs can be a bit tiring but the logs are still far easier to read than other competitor products **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** We mostly use Siteminder r6 and r12 for SSO and SAML federations, the top benefits I realized were ease of setting up new policies for new apps and the compatibility with most of our partners during SAML federation setup. ### 17. CA Siteminder **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Satish S. | Senior Consultant, Information Services **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Easy to understand, easy to implement new features by referring CA bookshelf documentation, better admin interface, easy to install and configure by just few clicks. Very less need of programming. Easy to debug logs, they are easily understandable. All type of authentication schemes are available. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** I have been working with this product since last 7 years. So far my experience has been really good. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Have implemented single sign on for various intranet applications and also implemented federation with various partners. ### 18. Responsible for Siteminder and Siteminder Federation. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Simplicity and the possibility to do everything from a single interface. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** To sensible on network issues, it made the Policy Server to be stucked and only the restart of the service. **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** Try to see all the features that the product have, it will give a very large variety. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Everything that is related with Siteminder and Siteminder Federation in the company. ### 19. Identity and Access management specialist **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Siteminder is a market leading tool for Access management mainly for Authentication and Authorization prespective. It is very robest and advance solution used in big orgnizations in the world forsecuring application both internally and externally **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Though Siteminder is very good Access management tool but it has lack of some domains like integration with thick client. CA should concentrate on support also to make it complete package for client **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** With Any access management tool like Siteminder you can give SSO experience to customer along with secure environment. ### 20. Perfect for an enterprise single signon solution **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mukesh K. | IT Architecture Cnslt, Hospital & Health Care, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 25, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Easy administration, enriched feature set, extensible design **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** C++ code so JNI interaction for custom plugins (even though there is a Java interface). Installation requirements and time for the install (ping federate is much easier) **Recommendations to others considering Symantec SiteMinder:** Keep using it. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Single Sign on Federation Advanced Authentication (MFA) ### 21. SSO **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Architecture and User Interface. Easy to learn **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** More tighter integration. UI could be more better **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Authentication and Authorization ### 22. IT infrastructure Lead **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Single sign on **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Cross site scripting and done flaws identified along the process **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** controls access to web resources, providing authentication management, policy-based authorization. ### 23. having more than 2 year experience with CA site Minder and CA Siteminder Federation module **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 02, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Distributed architecture and pre-configured modules **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** So many configuration required for setup environment. **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Achieving SSO and federation using CA siteminder product. ### 24. Best in class WAM **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Leisure, Travel & Tourism | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 11, 2014 **What do you like best about Symantec SiteMinder?** Full blown Web Access Management Suite with all features included. **What do you dislike about Symantec SiteMinder?** Too complicated and cumbersome with too many components, not scalable to Web 2.0 applications **What problems is Symantec SiteMinder solving and how is that benefiting you?** Web access management ## Symantec SiteMinder Discussions - [What is Symantec SiteMinder used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-symantec-siteminder-used-for) - [Is SiteMinder a SAML?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-siteminder-a-saml) - [How do I set up SiteMinder?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-do-i-set-up-siteminder) - [What is SiteMinder SSO?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-siteminder-sso) - [What is CA SiteMinder?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-ca-siteminder) - [View Symantec SiteMinder pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/symantec-siteminder/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-29+16%3A29%3A46+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=5f91671c-9a32-40d3-9bbb-6e9ad2c7bbf1&secure%5Btoken%5D=85faf3abd9800e250a4cd4d589d1656487c7a33667fe63577eb260819d915305&format=llm_user) ## Symantec SiteMinder Features **Authentication Options** - Authentication User experience - Supports Required Authentication systems - Multi-Factor Authentication - Supports Required Authentication Methods/Protocols - Federation/SAML support (idp) - Federation/SAML support (sp) **Access Control Types** - Local Access - Remote Access - Partner Access - Supports BYOD users **Administration** - Ease of installation on server - Password Policy Enforcement - Administration Console - Ease of connecting applications - Self Service Password Administration **Platform** - Multiple Operating system support - Multi-Domain Support - Cross Browser support - Fail over protection - Reporting - Auditing - Third Party Web Services support ## Top Symantec SiteMinder Alternatives - [Okta](https://www.g2.com/products/okta/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,202 reviews) - [Microsoft Entra ID](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-entra-id/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (869 reviews) - [Ping Identity](https://www.g2.com/products/ping-identity/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (113 reviews)