Active Directory Permissions Analyzer vs Obsidian Security - Excessive Privileges: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Short answer

Security teams managing Active Directory at mid-market to enterprise scale should pick Active Directory Permissions Analyzer when permission creep and orphaned access rights are eating your audit time. It runs agentless and requires no admin rights to surface domain-wide ACL visibility across custom schema classes and extended rights, meaning you audit without operational friction. Skip this if your organization hasn't standardized on Active Directory as your primary identity store or if you need real-time enforcement alongside analysis; this tool is audit-first, not remediation-focused. Security teams managing SaaS sprawl across SMB to enterprise deployments should pick Obsidian Security - Excessive Privileges for its ability to surface and remediate the permissions nobody remembers assigning. It covers both the visibility gap (ID.AM asset management) and the access control problem (PR.AA) in one workflow, eliminating the manual audit cycles that usually stretch across quarters. Skip this if your organization runs a locked-down SaaS roster with strong provisioning governance already in place; the tool's value compounds with chaos, not with discipline.