JIT Access — Head-to-Head

Britive vs. StrongDM

Both are cloud-native JIT platforms, but they solve access at different layers. Britive mints temporary cloud IAM permissions, no proxy, no agent, the access lives directly in AWS, Azure, or GCP's native permission model. StrongDM puts a proxy in front of the target, databases, SSH hosts, Kubernetes clusters, web apps, and injects short-lived credentials through that chokepoint. One removes itself from the access path; the other becomes the access path.

The fault line between them

Britive's no-proxy model means access looks, to the cloud provider, exactly like native IAM, just temporary. That's an advantage for environments that want zero architectural footprint beyond IAM policy, but it also means Britive has nothing in the data path to record what happened during the session itself beyond the API-level grant.

StrongDM's proxy is the point. Every session, database query, SSH command, kubectl call, runs through the StrongDM gateway, which is what makes its audit trail so complete: full session recording, not just a grant record. That completeness comes with an architectural tradeoff, the proxy is a chokepoint, and its high-availability design becomes a real deployment consideration rather than an afterthought.

Criteria	Britive	StrongDM
Architecture
JIT model	Ephemeral native cloud IAM profile, no proxy	Proxied session with short-lived token injection
Session-level audit	Grant-level audit; no session content recording	Full session recording through the proxy; strong forensic trail
Architectural footprint	None beyond IAM policy; no agent or proxy in the path	Proxy gateway is a required architectural component
Coverage
Multi-cloud IAM breadth	Purpose-built for AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS in one consistent model	Covers cloud consoles but not the architectural center of the product
Database and SSH targets	Database access via cloud IAM role provisioning, not direct	Direct, native support for databases, SSH, Kubernetes, and web apps
On-prem support	None; cloud and SaaS only	Supported via the proxy model
Operational
Deployment simplicity	No gateway to deploy or maintain	Gateway high availability is a real operational consideration
Agent requirement	None	None on targets; proxy-based, not agent-based

Capability assessments based on publicly available vendor documentation and independent coverage. Validate specific feature depth against your environment before purchase.

When each wins

Britive wins when

The primary problem is standing cloud IAM permissions across multiple providers
A zero-footprint architecture, no proxy or gateway to deploy, is a priority
Database and SSH-target JIT are secondary to cloud console and API access

StrongDM wins when

Full session recording and forensic-grade audit trail for databases and infrastructure are a hard requirement
Engineering teams need JIT access to databases, SSH hosts, and Kubernetes through one proxy
The organization can support a high-availability gateway as critical infrastructure

Finding

Britive and StrongDM solve overlapping problems from opposite architectural instincts: remove yourself from the path versus become the path. Britive's no-proxy model is simpler to deploy and operate but produces a thinner audit record. StrongDM's proxy gives the deepest session-level visibility in the cloud-native JIT category at the cost of a gateway that has to be treated as critical infrastructure. The choice tracks directly to how much the buyer needs to see inside the session, not just that access was granted.