The Top 7 PAM Vendors and Alternatives in 2026

Key Takeaways

• Privileged access management, or PAM, developed around the protection of powerful accounts, credentials and administrative sessions. The category now reaches well beyond those origins, with major vendors supporting service accounts, workloads, machine identities and other forms of automated access.
• Aembit is an identity and access management platform for AI agents and workloads. It verifies software identities, evaluates policy and runtime context when access is requested and issues or brokers short-lived credentials for approved access.
• PAM products vary considerably in scope. Some combine credential vaulting, session management, endpoint privilege management and remote access. Others concentrate on infrastructure access, identity governance or privileged roles within a particular cloud environment.
• Organizations assessing access controls for AI agents and workloads should examine more than whether a product supports machine identities. The methods used for identity verification, authorization, credential delivery, enforcement and audit are equally important.

Organizations have administrators, scripts, services and, increasingly, AI agents that need elevated access to sensitive systems. Those systems may include production databases, cloud consoles, domain controllers, SaaS applications and financial platforms. Privileged access management products help control that access and reduce the likelihood that powerful credentials remain exposed, overprivileged or insufficiently monitored.

The 2023 Capita breach illustrates the consequences. Attackers used a privileged service account with unrestricted domain administrator rights and no session monitoring to move through internal systems before deploying ransomware.

PAM remains a central part of enterprise AI agent identity security, although the definition of the category has widened substantially. Products that began with password vaulting and privileged session management increasingly cover service accounts, machine credentials, cloud infrastructure and workloads.

At the same time, AI agents are introducing access patterns that differ from the administrative sessions around which PAM developed. An agent may call an API, invoke an MCP tool or connect directly to a SaaS application, database or other service. Those interactions place greater weight on identity, authorization and credential delivery at the point when access is requested.

For organizations sorting through these categories, it is useful to distinguish traditional PAM from workload identity and access management, while recognizing that the two areas increasingly overlap.

This guide examines established PAM vendors alongside Aembit, which approaches access from the perspective of AI agents and workloads.

Where PAM Vendors Diverge

The products below differ in several structural respects. Those distinctions are often more useful than comparing long feature inventories.

• Deployment model. Some PAM products can run in customer-managed environments, while others are delivered primarily as SaaS. Several vendors support both models.
• Types of identities covered. Human administrators remain a fundamental PAM use case, although modern platforms increasingly support service accounts, applications, workloads and other machine identities.
• Session management. CyberArk and BeyondTrust provide extensive controls for privileged sessions, including monitoring and recording. Teleport also records infrastructure sessions, although its architecture centers more heavily on identity-based access to engineering infrastructure.
• Scope. Some platforms combine password management, endpoint privilege management, remote access, identity governance and machine identity capabilities. Others address a narrower set of privileged-access requirements.

Certification status, integrations and audit capabilities also change over time. Organizations should verify current vendor documentation before relying on a point-in-time comparison.

Ranking the Top PAM Vendors and Alternatives

1) Aembit

Aembit is an identity and access management platform for AI agents and workloads. Its architecture is centered on software requesting access to enterprise resources rather than administrators opening privileged sessions.

The platform verifies the identity of an agent, application or service, evaluates policy and runtime context and issues or brokers a short-lived credential after access has been approved.

For agents acting on behalf of a user, Aembit’s blended identity model incorporates both the agent identity and the user identity into the access decision. This allows organizations to account for who authorized an agent as well as which software is making the request.

Aembit also supports OAuth 2.1 authorization for MCP clients and applies identity, policy and credential controls to interactions between agents and MCP servers.

One $300 billion investment firm used Aembit to remove long-lived credentials from Claude and MCP server configurations and replace them with short-lived, policy-scoped tokens.

For organizations evaluating access by AI agents, applications and other workloads, the relevant distinction is the point at which access is evaluated and enforced. Aembit applies identity verification, authorization, credential delivery and enforcement around the software interaction itself.

2) CyberArk

CyberArk is one of the largest and most established vendors in privileged access management. Its portfolio includes credential vaulting, privileged session management, endpoint privilege management, secrets management and machine identity security.

The company has expanded considerably beyond privileged administrator accounts. Its products address application credentials, workloads, DevOps environments, machine identities and other automated access scenarios.

Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of CyberArk in February 2026 for about $21.1 billion, adding identity security to its broader cybersecurity portfolio.

CyberArk is generally best suited to large organizations that require extensive PAM capabilities and have the resources to support the implementation, integration and continuing administration of a broad enterprise platform.

3) BeyondTrust

BeyondTrust combines privileged password management, endpoint privilege management, remote access and related security functions within a broad PAM portfolio. It supports self-hosted, cloud and hybrid deployment models.

The platform has particular depth in endpoint environments where organizations need to restrict administrative privileges on Windows and Linux systems while also controlling passwords and remote privileged access.

BeyondTrust also supports service accounts and other machine identities, which extends its coverage beyond interactive administrator sessions.

Its range of capabilities can suit organizations seeking to consolidate privileged-access functions with one vendor, although the number of components can increase configuration and administrative requirements.

4) Delinea

Delinea provides credential vaulting, privileged-access controls, least-privilege enforcement and related PAM capabilities. Secret Server remains one of its best-known products, with cloud and self-hosted deployment options.

The company was formed through the 2022 merger of Thycotic and Centrify and has continued to expand the combined PAM portfolio.

Delinea also addresses machine identities and automated access, giving organizations coverage beyond traditional privileged human accounts.

Its mix of cloud and customer-managed deployment options can suit organizations that want broad PAM functionality while retaining flexibility over how individual components are deployed.

5) Teleport

Teleport provides identity-based access to infrastructure, including SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, internal web applications and Windows systems.

The platform replaces many conventional infrastructure access mechanisms, including SSH keys, bastion hosts and VPN-based administrative paths, with short-lived certificates and centrally managed identity policies.

Teleport also records sessions and maintains centralized audit trails, which gives security and infrastructure teams a detailed record of privileged activity.

Its strongest use cases tend to appear in engineering and cloud-native environments where infrastructure access is the principal concern.

6) Saviynt

Saviynt combines identity governance and administration with privileged-access capabilities in a cloud-based platform.

Its approach connects privileged access with identity lifecycle management, entitlement governance, access reviews and compliance workflows. This can appeal to large enterprises that want closer coordination between identity governance and privileged-access administration.

The breadth of the platform can also introduce additional implementation requirements for organizations whose needs are confined primarily to PAM.

7) Microsoft Entra PIM

Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management is part of Microsoft Entra ID Governance. It provides time-based and approval-based activation for privileged roles, along with access reviews, notifications and related controls.

It is particularly useful for organizations already invested in Microsoft Entra ID and Azure because privileged roles can be administered within the same identity environment.

Entra PIM has a narrower remit than a comprehensive PAM suite. Organizations that require credential vaulting, detailed privileged-session management or broad coverage across on-premises and third-party infrastructure may need additional tools.

How PAM Is Expanding Into Software Access

The distinction between PAM and software access has become less precise as vendors have added support for service accounts, machine identities, secrets, workloads and automated processes.

The form of the access request still provides a useful way to evaluate the available products.

A human administrator may activate a privileged role, retrieve a credential and establish a session with a server or administrative console. PAM vendors have spent many years developing controls for that type of activity, including approval workflows, credential protection, session monitoring and forensic records.

An AI agent may instead call an API, invoke an MCP tool, query a SaaS application or connect programmatically to a database. In those circumstances, organizations need to establish which agent is making the request, whether a user or business process authorized it, which resource it is attempting to reach and which permissions should apply at that moment.

Those questions are closely related to AI agent identity and access and to the broader discipline of workload IAM.

Aembit concentrates on those software-driven interactions. Its platform applies identity verification, policy evaluation, credential delivery and enforcement as agents and workloads request access to enterprise resources.

Traditional PAM continues to serve an important role in protecting administrator accounts, powerful credentials, privileged sessions and elevation workflows. In many organizations, PAM and workload or agent access controls will operate alongside one another because they address different portions of the access environment.

Organizations evaluating AI agent and workload access can talk to an Aembit engineer or request a free Aembit tenant to examine how identity-based runtime access works in practice.