Hey everyone, I'm still pretty new to the whole PAM world. My small team is looking at implementing our first proper privileged access management solution.
We're a team of 5 managing a mix of on-prem servers and AWS accounts. I've narrowed it down to Delinea (Secret Server) and ManageEngine PAM360 mostly because they seem to have a free or low-cost tier for smaller teams. I need something we can get running without a massive learning curve.
Can anyone share their experience with either for a small setup? I'm especially curious about:
- Which one is easier to get started with for cloud resources (like AWS IAM)?
- How is the day-to-day user experience for a small team?
- Any hidden costs we should watch out for?
Just looking for some real-world, beginner-friendly advice. Thanks!
Hey, I'm also on a small team (6 people) managing IT for a property management company. We handle a handful of on-prem VMs and cloud accounts. I've been running Delinea Secret Server's free tier for about 9 months now to manage our server and database passwords.
**Core Comparison:**
**Getting Started with Cloud (AWS):** PAM360 felt more turnkey for AWS. They have a specific connector template, and I got our IAM roles linked in an afternoon. Delinea works, but you need to configure the PowerShell module first, which took me a couple of days to get right. PAM360 was easier here.
**Day-to-Day for a Small Team:** Delinea's web vault is simpler for us. My team just bookmarks it, searches for a system, and clicks to check out the password. PAM360's portal has more dashboards and options, which felt like overkill for our needs and slowed down basic password retrieval.
**Hidden Costs to Watch:** With Delinea's free tier (up to 1000 secrets), the jump to the paid "Team" plan was steep - it started around $1500/year for us. PAM360's pricing was more linear per-admin, but their support for the base tier is email-only. A phone support add-on was an extra 20% annually.
**Where Each One Clearly Wins:** Delinea wins on simplicity for basic password vaulting. If your main goal is to stop sharing root passwords in a spreadsheet, it's straightforward. PAM360 wins on built-in automation. Its workflow for automatically changing a service account password on a schedule and updating it across our three servers worked without me writing scripts.
**My Pick:**
For your team of 5 just starting out, I'd recommend trying Delinea's free tier first. It's the fastest way to get basic control over your privileged accounts. If you find you need deeper automation or broader cloud integrations right away, then look at PAM360. To make a clean call, tell us if you spend more time on daily password access or on monthly compliance and rotation tasks.
user882 makes a good point about PAM360 being more turnkey for AWS. But that initial ease can be a trap. For a team of five, the long-term maintenance overhead matters more.
I've managed both. Delinea's free tier is actually usable for production if you're disciplined. PAM360's "free" version will constantly nudge you towards paid modules. The dashboard bloat user882 mentioned becomes a real productivity sink.
Watch for session recording requirements. Both will hit you with a licensing wall once you need to record SSH or RDP sessions, which you probably will for compliance. That's the real hidden cost.
The free tier trap is real. I'd argue the bigger time sink with PAM360 isn't just dashboard bloat, it's all the "helpful" automated workflows and alerts it tries to set up by default. You'll spend more time tuning out noise than actually managing access.
>Watch for session recording requirements.
That's the killer. Both solutions become a different financial conversation the moment you tick that box for compliance. The real question isn't which free tier is better, it's which one lets you pilot the actual workflow you'll need later without locking you into their most expensive SKU from day one.
-- old school