JIT Access — Head-to-Head

CyberArk vs. Britive

These two don't compete on features so much as on a starting assumption about where the privileged access problem actually lives. CyberArk assumes the problem is administrative credentials that need to be vaulted, rotated, and brokered through an audited session. Britive assumes the problem is standing cloud IAM permissions that should never have been persistent in the first place. Both produce JIT access. They start from opposite ends of the infrastructure, and for most buyers this isn't really a head-to-head, it's a replace-or-overlay decision.

Criteria	CyberArk	Britive
Architecture
JIT model	Vault checkout + session proxy	Ephemeral IAM profile with session timer, no vault checkout
Native cloud IAM idiom	Extended via Privileged Cloud; vault model carries into cloud	Built natively for cloud IAM semantics (AWS IAM, Azure RBAC, GCP IAM)
On-premises / AD coverage	Deepest AD and on-prem PAM coverage in the market	None — cloud and SaaS only
Session recording	Privileged Session Manager records and proxies sessions	No session proxy; access is API-native role assumption, not a recorded session
Coverage
Multi-cloud breadth	Covered via Privileged Cloud; secondary to core on-prem product	Purpose-built for AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS in one consistent model
SaaS target coverage	Limited outside core PAM use cases	Broad SaaS integration catalog
Hybrid environments	Strongest option where the estate is genuinely hybrid with heavy on-prem	Not applicable — no on-prem story
Workload / NHI	Available via add-on modules	Service account provisioning through the IAM layer; not the primary focus
Operational
Deployment complexity	High — vault infrastructure and PSM deployment typically require professional services	Lower — SaaS-delivered, no vault infrastructure to stand up
Compliance/audit model	Centralized, session-level audit trail across all privileged accounts	Per-resource ephemeral grant audit; no session recording
Ownership / roadmap	Now part of Palo Alto Networks' Identity Security pillar; integration ongoing	Independent; no ownership transition to track

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

CyberArk wins when

The estate is genuinely hybrid, with significant on-premises infrastructure and AD dependency that isn't going away
Compliance requirements demand centralized, recorded sessions for all privileged access, not just cloud IAM
An existing CyberArk deployment already covers on-prem, and the cloud question is "extend or overlay," not "replace"
The partner and integration ecosystem is a procurement requirement on its own

Britive wins when

The privileged access problem is overwhelmingly cloud IAM — engineers with standing roles across AWS, Azure, and GCP
There's no meaningful on-premises PAM requirement to justify vault infrastructure
Deployment speed and lower operational overhead matter more than session-level recording
SaaS target breadth matters alongside core cloud IAM coverage

The real decision

For most enterprises, this isn't a replacement decision, it's a coverage-gap decision. CyberArk handles what it has always handled: AD, on-prem, recorded administrative sessions. Britive handles what CyberArk's architecture wasn't built for: ephemeral, API-native cloud IAM at the pace cloud environments actually change.

One thing complicates that gap now. Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of CyberArk in February 2026 and has publicly framed just-in-time access as a direction for the combined platform, which means the architectural divide this comparison rests on is the exact thing CyberArk's new owner says it intends to close. That is worth weighing against what actually changes for CyberArk customers once integration starts, rather than what the acquirer announces on day one.

The narrow case where this becomes a true either/or is a cloud-first organization with a residual on-prem footprint too small to justify CyberArk's deployment complexity. There, the question is whether session recording and centralized vault audit are a hard compliance requirement — if so, CyberArk's depth wins even at higher overhead. If cloud IAM hygiene is the actual problem being solved, Britive solves it with substantially less deployment cost.

Buyers running both side by side, CyberArk for the legacy estate and Britive for cloud, are not making a mistake. They're matching architecture to where the access problem actually exists in their environment.