How to Choose an IGA Platform

Identity Governance projects succeed or fail on fit and connectors. Here is how to choose well.

1. Define the outcomes you need

Access reviews and certifications, automated provisioning, separation of duties, role management, or all of the above? Compliance-driven buyers should map requirements to frameworks first; see the audit preparation guide.

2. Check connector coverage

IGA lives or dies on integrations. List your target systems (HR, cloud, SaaS, on-prem, mainframe) and confirm each has a supported, maintained connector. Thin connector coverage means costly custom work.

3. Modern vs traditional

Newer cloud-native tools deploy fast and excel at SaaS; established suites go deeper on complex legacy estates. Match the tool to your environment, not the hype.

4. Score and pilot

Use the methodology and capability checker to compare governance and lifecycle depth, then pilot a real certification campaign.

5. Test against your worst applications, not their reference architecture

Every governance platform demos beautifully against Active Directory and a well-behaved SaaS application. Ask both vendors to connect to your five hardest systems: the mainframe, the ERP with no modern API, the homegrown application whose owner left, the SaaS tool with a proprietary permission model, and the cloud account with role chaining. That proof of concept tells you more than the feature matrix.

6. Budget for identity data quality

The reason IGA implementations run long is almost never the product. It is that the HR system, the directory, and the applications disagree about who exists, which accounts belong to whom, and what an entitlement means. Reconciling that is a project of its own, and it happens whether or not you plan for it.

Ask specifically: what percentage of accounts in your target systems can be matched to an authoritative identity today? If you do not know, that is your first work item, and it is independent of vendor selection.

7. Design certification so it produces revocations

A certification campaign that shows reviewers a list of raw entitlement names produces approvals. APP_FIN_GL_RW_PROD means nothing to a manager, so they approve everything and the campaign generates evidence without reducing risk.

Campaigns that produce real revocations do three things: translate entitlements into business language, show usage data alongside the grant ("not used in 180 days"), and make revocation the low-effort default rather than an exception requiring justification. Ask each vendor to demonstrate all three. Auditors increasingly ask for the revocation rate, not the completion rate. See access certification.

8. Ask about non-human identities

Service accounts and workloads outnumber employees in most environments and appear in almost no certification campaign, because they have no manager to attest for them. Ask how each platform handles ownership assignment, review, and the growing population of AI agents. This is where the category is heading and where SailPoint's Entro Security acquisition in June 2026 was aimed.

Where to start

Where to start

Browse IGA platforms and SailPoint vs Saviynt.