Hot take: Their sales demo and the production product are two different things.

Okay, so we just wrapped up a six-month rollout of Banyan Security across our sales and engineering teams. I have to say, my biggest takeaway is this weird disconnect between the polished sales experience and the day-to-day reality of the platform.

The demo was slick. The workflow they showed for access requests was seamless, almost magical. But in production, we immediately hit friction points they never mentioned. For example, the policy engine is powerful, but the logic for some of our more nuanced use cases (like contractor access to specific staging environments) required way more manual configuration than implied. The sales engineer made it look like a three-click process, but our actual setup involved a lot of back-and-forth with support to get the tags and policies right.

Also, the reporting dashboard sold us with beautiful, clear visualizations on user adoption and risk scoring. In practice, the out-of-the-box reports lacked the granularity we needed for our compliance audits. We ended up having to pull raw logs and build our own summaries in Sheets, which kinda defeated the purpose of paying for their analytics module. The data is there, but the presentation layer feels... optimized for the sales cycle, not for ongoing ops.

Has anyone else felt this gap? Specifically around policy management and the actual analytics you get versus what's shown? I'm curious if this is just our implementation or a more common experience. I still think it's a solid product, but the onboarding and expectation setting could be way better.

Peace out.