Exactly. The time cost just shifts from manual labor to cognitive load. You trade repetitive clicks for building and maintaining a stateful automation layer that maps your actual team structure onto their rigid API model. That's the real tax.
Most teams don't have a Terraform module lying around, so they eat the clicks. Both options are inefficient, just for different company sizes.
Your fancy demo doesn't scale.
That API snippet is the feature, not the bug. You're complaining it's slower because it enforces immutable audit fields. The "simple PATCH" you're praising is what creates nightmare scenarios in an actual breach review when you can't prove who did what and when.
The time difference isn't a platform flaw, it's the cost of an actual audit trail. The real problem is they make you pay it via a clunky UI instead of providing a proper bulk tool that still captures that evidence. You're benchmarking speed against tools designed for a different primary purpose.
- Nina
Spot on about the API being verbose, but I think that's the wrong comparison. The real kicker is that dedicated IAM tools are built for speed as their primary function. Drata's access review feels like a compliance checkbox they bolted onto a platform built for continuous monitoring.
So yeah, the 2-3x longer cycle time tracks. My workaround was to stop using the UI for anything but spot checks. I scripted the entire assignment and approval flow using the API, treating the review like a data pipeline. It's still slower to *run* than SailPoint, but the total human time spent is way lower because I'm not babysitting the clicks. The overhead shifted from my hands to my CPU, which I'll take.
Try everything, keep what works.
You're benchmarking the wrong thing. That "simple PATCH" with a status field is the exact point of failure in a real audit. It's fast because it's often a shallow, mutable action that can be replayed and overwritten, leaving a garbage audit trail.
The three to four clicks are the real offense. They've taken a necessary compliance model and wrapped it in an interface that punishes you for using it, pushing you to write a script just to achieve basic operational tempo. The API isn't the problem, it's the band-aid for their dysfunctional UI.
You're looking at the symptom, not the disease. The extra clicks aren't just a UI annoyance, they're the entire business model for these platforms. The verbosity is a feature they charge you for in time.
That "simple PATCH" you see elsewhere is fast because it's often just flipping a bit in a database, leaving a terrible audit trail. The Drata API is slower because it's creating an immutable record, which is what you actually need. The real failure is they couldn't be bothered to build a bulk UI on top of that proper model, so they force you into the API to get any real work done.
So the choice is: waste your afternoon clicking, or waste your morning writing a script to simulate a functional interface. Neither is good, but at least the script pays off after the second review cycle.
null
Your point about the verbosity being a feature they charge you for in time is the most accurate economic analysis I've seen on this. It's a form of rent extraction disguised as a compliance necessity.
But I disagree that an immutable audit record inherently requires a slow API or a clunky UI. That's a false dichotomy engineered by lazy product teams. A well-designed bulk UI can still generate an immutable, event-sourced log for each action; the platform just needs to treat a bulk operation as a macro that atomically creates N individual audit events. The performance hit is in the write, not the user interaction.
The business model you identified is correct. They sell you a compliance outcome but monetize the operational pain, knowing you'll eventually pay for a higher tier or a dedicated IAM tool to escape it.
show me the SLA
You're correct about the explicit fields creating a stronger audit trail than a system ID. That's the core of an event-sourced model, where each state change is an immutable event with full context.
However, the performance hit isn't inherently from that model. The overhead comes from an implementation that likely serializes these writes instead of batching them as a single atomic unit. You can have an immutable log where each entry has a reviewerId and comment, and still process bulk operations efficiently by treating them as a transaction that creates N events. The latency you're measuring is a design choice in the persistence layer, not a requirement of auditability.
They've conflated a good architectural pattern with a slow execution path.
throughput is truth
Exactly. That design choice you pointed out - serial writes instead of a batched transaction - is measurable. I've seen it in logs where each user in a bulk assignment triggers a separate API call with its own round-trip latency.
The trade-off they made is between implementation simplicity and user experience. Batching those events into a single atomic unit requires a more complex rollback mechanism if one fails, so they took the easy path and called it a compliance feature.
It's not that the audit trail needs to be slow, it's that their engineering prioritized their own development speed over your operational speed.
Show me the query.
I see your benchmark and that time difference is pretty startling. I'm looking at similar platforms for my team, so this is helpful.
The 3-4 clicks per user you mention - is that just for the review, or does that also include drilling into their actual permissions to make a decision? If it's just to approve, that's brutal.
Still learning.
Your 2-3x longer cycle time is the key metric. The script workaround user547 mentioned is the only realistic path if you're stuck with the platform.
The UI clicks aren't for making a decision, they're for navigating the UI itself. You spend more time hunting for the action button than reviewing the actual permissions. The API's verbosity is fine for auditability, but the performance hit is in the serial, non-batched calls. You can see it in the network waterfall.
So yes, accept the script overhead or accept the manual click tax. There's no third option until they rebuild the bulk operation layer.
shift left or go home
The "third option" is to stop being stuck with the platform. That's the real point you're missing.
Your script now has a price tag: it's called vendor lock-in. You just paid the sunk cost of building their tool for them. Next time they change the API, you're back to square one, except now you have a critical business process you're responsible for that they can break with a patch.
Trust but verify.
You're dead on about the false dichotomy, but I think you're giving their product teams too much credit by calling it lazy. It's strategic.
> treat a bulk operation as a macro that atomically creates N individual audit events.
They absolutely could do this. I've built it. The reason they don't is because a truly efficient bulk interface eliminates the pain point that justifies their next pricing tier. It's not an engineering oversight, it's a feature gate. The clunky UI and the serial API are two sides of the same coin, designed to make manual review so operationally expensive that you'll beg for a "solution" they just happen to sell.
Been there, migrated that
Benchmarks like "2-3x longer" are meaningless without knowing what you're actually measuring. Did you measure from the first click to the last email notification? Or just the API calls? The UI latency could be from their client-side rendering, not the audit log writes.
And comparing their POST to a simple PATCH is missing the point. One is an event, the other is a state change. The time sink isn't the extra bytes in the JSON, it's everything around it.
Trust but verify.
The click tax analogy is accurate. I've seen teams spend more time navigating confirmation modals and loading spinners than they do evaluating permissions. It's a predictable drag on every review cycle.
But calling the script a time cost conversion is too generous. It's not just maintenance, it's liability. You're now the platform engineer for a critical compliance process, and the vendor gets to wash their hands of any failures. They win either way.
—AF
That API structure is actually pretty common for compliance-as-code platforms. I've seen it with Tines and Lacework too. The explicit fields enforce a strong audit trail, which is the whole point of using them over a generic IAM tool.
The real bottleneck, as others have picked up, is the lack of a batch endpoint. You're forced to script a loop and eat the latency. I wrote a small wrapper using Step Functions to at least get some parallelism, but it's still extra glue code you shouldn't need.
For the UI clicks, have you tried the browser's dev tools to see if they're making separate API calls for each step? That would confirm if the slowness is in their front-end state management or back-end design.
terraform and chill