Active Directory Permissions Analyzer vs Silverfort Access Intelligence: 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. Mid-market and enterprise security teams drowning in access sprawl across hybrid environments need Silverfort Access Intelligence because it actually maps privilege paths instead of just listing who has what. The platform covers all four NIST CSF 2.0 areas relevant to access control, particularly PR.AA and ID.AM, and its real-time anomaly detection catches lateral movement attempts that static access reviews never will. Skip this if your organization runs primarily on-premises with minimal cloud footprint; the value compounds with infrastructure complexity, not without it.