Comparison
Entra PIM alternatives, and the platform wall every PIM hits
Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management, also written Entra ID PIM, and still widely typed as Azure AD PIM or Azure PIM. Same product, four names.
Every platform's privileged access tool works well inside its own platform and stops at the edge of it. That edge is where most real estates live.
Microsoft Entra PIM grants time-bound, approval-gated access to Entra ID roles, Azure resource roles, and Entra group membership. It is built for one platform, and the moment your privileged access spans a second one — AWS, GitHub, Google Workspace, Okta, on-premises Active Directory — you need something whose model is not tied to a single vendor's directory.
The wall
PIM's reach is defined by what Entra is authoritative for. Anything outside Microsoft has to be dragged inside first: the system must be federated to Entra, then given a provisioning integration, one per application, and then governed indirectly through an Entra group whose membership propagates outward on a schedule.
Ask what that means for an ordinary estate. A company running Azure and a couple of AWS accounts and GitHub for source control and a Google Workspace domain and the Active Directory that still gates the file servers is not unusual — it is the normal shape of a company that has been operating for more than a few years. PIM governs one of those five well and reaches the others only by making them downstream of Entra.
The same page could be written about every vendor's privileged access tool, changing only the nouns. Each one is excellent inside its own platform and has no answer at the boundary, because each was built by a platform vendor to govern that platform. The boundary is the product gap, and it is structural rather than something the next release fixes.
Groups already do everything, including a single Key Vault
The common assumption is that group-based access is coarse and PIM's per-resource model is what you need for fine-grained scoping. That is backwards, and it is worth being precise about why.
Azure RBAC role assignments take a group as the principal, at any scope
Azure supports — management group, subscription, resource group, or one individual
resource. Assign Key Vault Secrets User on kv-001 to a group, and
membership of that group is scoped access to that one Key Vault. Nothing is
lost. The
Key Vault RBAC guide
walks through exactly this assignment.
The same is true one layer up. Entra directory roles can be assigned to role-assignable groups, so even a directory role is reachable through group membership.
Which makes group membership the universal primitive. Time-box membership and you have time-boxed everything attached to that group — at whatever scope, on whatever resource, on whatever platform. That single mechanism is what lets one tool span systems that share no directory at all.
The part that decides it: what happens when a new resource appears
This is the difference that shows up in year two, and it is the one to actually weigh.
PIM binds eligibility per role, per scope. A new subscription, a new resource group, a new Key Vault means going back into PIM: onboard the scope, define eligibility on it, set the activation duration, the approval requirement, the justification policy and the notification rules for that assignment. Multiply by the number of roles that matter on it. The configuration surface grows with your estate, forever, and it grows in the place an engineer has to remember to go.
With group-based access the binding already exists. Attach the group you already use to the new resource — one role assignment, the same operation you were doing anyway to grant standing access — and every access package that grants that group covers the new resource from that moment. No new eligibility. No new approval policy. No second place to configure and no second place to forget.
Provision a new Key Vault on a Friday afternoon. Under a per-resource model, the people who should be able to elevate to it cannot until somebody configures eligibility for that scope. Under a group model, you assign the existing group during provisioning — a line in the same template that created the vault — and the access package that has been in place for two years already covers it.
Four more things worth knowing before you commit
Revocation waits on a sync cycle
When PIM reaches a non-Microsoft system, it does so by activating an Entra group and letting provisioning carry that membership outward. Microsoft's own figures: the SCIM provisioning cycle for AWS IAM Identity Center runs roughly every 40 minutes, and Entra Connect group writeback lands on the next sync, up to 30 minutes.
The entire argument for just-in-time access is that the window closes by itself. If revocation reaches the system up to forty minutes after the window ended, the real window is the one you configured plus forty minutes of standing privilege — on the system you cared enough about to protect this way. For a shift change that is a rounding error. For a contractor whose engagement just ended, it is what the auditor asks about.
Groups that came from on-prem AD cannot be PIM-enabled at all
Microsoft's PIM for Groups documentation is explicit: any Entra security or Microsoft 365 group can be brought under PIM except dynamic membership groups and groups synchronized from on-premises.
Those are precisely the groups a hybrid estate gates its file shares, SQL servers and line-of-business applications with. The supported path is to build a parallel cloud group model and write it back down — which means migrating your group model before you can govern it, and inheriting the writeback delay above.
Approvers need a license, even if they never elevate
PIM requires Entra ID P2 or Entra ID Governance per user, and Microsoft's licensing guidance is specific that this covers users who approve or reject activation requests. A line manager whose entire involvement is clicking approve twice a month needs a P2 license. The cost scales with how widely you distribute approval authority — which is to say, it charges you for delegating well.
When nobody approves, the answer is a permanent Global Administrator
PIM's approval step has no way through when the approver does not respond. Microsoft's documentation is plain about it: approvers have 24 hours, a request not approved in that time has to be submitted again, the window is not configurable, and approvers cannot approve their own activation requests. At 2am with an incident open, the request waits.
Microsoft's answer for the case where nobody can approve at all is the emergency access account — its own list of reasons to keep one includes eligible admin roles whose activation requires approval with no approver left to give it. And the guidance for those accounts is that Global Administrator is assigned active permanent rather than eligible. That is the right design for an identity-provider outage, which is what the account is really for. It also means the in-platform fallback for an unanswered approval is an identity that holds the most powerful role in the tenant all the time, kept in a safe — and a team that finds the safe inconvenient at 2am tends to solve that by keeping a second, less sealed standing admin instead.
TemprBac treats the unanswered approval as its own case. An org can allow break-glass approval: after a wait of 5 to 60 minutes, the requester may approve their own request with a written reason, the package's approvers and the org's admins are emailed at once, and the access expires on the package's normal window because it went through the normal grant path. The emergency access account stays sealed for the outage it exists for.
How TemprBac does it
TemprBac works with any system that has roles and an API. It calls each system directly rather than orchestrating one vendor's directory and waiting for the change to propagate, so nothing has to be federated to a single identity provider first — an AWS account and an Okta org sit in the same access package without either being downstream of the other.
Today that means Entra ID groups via Microsoft Graph, Okta groups, GitHub organization teams, Google Workspace groups, AWS IAM groups, and on-premises Active Directory through an agent that runs inside your network and talks to your domain controller — so AD groups are governed in place, as they are, whether or not they originated in AD.
Access is granted as a package: a named bundle of groups across those systems, requested by the person who needs it, approved if the package requires it, and revoked automatically when the window closes. A worker checks for expiry on a ten-second cycle and calls each removal straight through, so the window you set is close to the window that applies.
One rule shapes the product: nothing may block revocation. No plan limit, no quota, no billing state stops access from expiring, because a cap that could stop revocation would silently convert every temporary grant into a permanent one — which is the problem the whole category exists to solve. Single sign-on is included on every tier, and pricing covers what the limits do affect.
Side by side
| Entra PIM | TemprBac | |
|---|---|---|
| Systems it governs | Microsoft; others only if federated to Entra and provisioned | Any system with roles and an API, called directly |
| Scoping to one resource | Per-resource eligibility, configured per scope | Group holds the role assignment at any scope, including one Key Vault |
| A new resource comes online | Onboard the scope, define eligibility and policy for it | Assign the existing group; the access package already covers it |
| On-prem AD groups created in AD | Not eligible for PIM | Governed in place, via an in-network agent |
| Revocation off-platform | Next provisioning or sync cycle, up to 40 minutes | Ten-second cycle, direct API call |
| Cost of an approver | Entra ID P2 or Governance license each | Included; SSO on every tier |
| Nobody answers the approval | Request waits up to 24 hours, then must be resubmitted; the fallback is a permanently active emergency Global Administrator | Optional break-glass after a 5–60 minute wait; everyone emailed; expires with the package |
| Second platform in scope | Federate it, build provisioning, accept the sync delay | Add the system, use it in the same package |
Where the line actually falls
If Microsoft is genuinely the whole estate and always will be — one tenant, no AWS, no GitHub, no Google, no Active Directory of consequence — PIM is sitting in a tenant you already run and there is a reasonable argument for using what you have.
That describes fewer companies than it sounds like. Most estates cross a platform boundary long before anyone plans for it, usually the first time a team picks a tool that is not Microsoft's, and the access model then has to be rebuilt around a wall nobody chose. The group-based model does not have that wall in it, which is the reason to start there rather than arrive there.
TemprBac grants and revokes membership; it is not your identity provider and does not replace sign-in, Conditional Access, or the policies your IdP already enforces on the way in. A system it manages has to express access as roles or groups reachable over an API — which covers every system listed above, and is the reason the list can keep growing. Self-hosting runs the whole product inside your own infrastructure if that is what your controls require.