# Microsoft Entra 8 Hacker News commenters recommended Microsoft Entra and 18 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. **Verdict:** People recommend Entra as a cloud identity platform with built-in RBAC and phish-resistant MFA, even on the free tier. Critics warn of vendor lock-in and past security flaws. ## Why people recommend it - Replaces Active Directory and scales permissions (2 comments): "it's possible to use Entra as your Active Directory, along with the fine grained RBAC built in to the platform" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871077)) "Entra is one of the few software that manages permissions at scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46289424)) - Phish-resistant MFA and SSO standards (2 comments): "Even with the free version you get phish-resistant MFA, SAML, OIDC, OAuth." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48005661)) "platform SSO works pretty well, at least with Entra and Okta" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252401)) ## What people warn about - Poor documentation and slow performance (4 comments): "Between Entra and Dataverse and everything else, the whole system is a poorly documented bowl of spaghetti." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181451)) "documentation from both Microsoft & Canonical had heavily generated documentation that was flat out wrong" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995899)) "I was using Entra and Azure the other day and boy are they slow and clunky." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49231035)) - Security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations (3 comments): "Entra has already had vulnerabilities where a user in one tenant could access global admin of every other tenant." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913587)) "Entra misconfiguration that got Microsoft's own sensitive internal services owned by a researcher" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081613)) "I mean Entra and Okta got popped." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50282395)) - Employer policies limit passkeys (3 comments): "Every step along the way of a corporate MS account is bullshit, passkeys are just a victim of enterprise policies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090886)) "Microsoft Entra is a workforce product. An employer always decides how you authenticate to your work account." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090068)) "I was not able to store and use the passkey in my password manager of choice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50089969)) - Vendor lock-in across Microsoft products (2 comments): "the horizontal integration across Entra, not the Office experience, that is the lock in" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46202270)) "Intune and Entra are the vendor-lock in technologies" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47508106)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Keycloak](https://hackerapproved.com/p/keycloak.md): 44 recommend - [Authentik](https://hackerapproved.com/p/authentik.md): 14 recommend - [FreeIPA](https://hackerapproved.com/p/freeipa.md): 14 recommend - [Okta](https://hackerapproved.com/p/okta.md): 11 recommend - [Ory](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ory.md): 8 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/identity-access/microsoft-entra-id) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Microsoft Entra", https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-entra/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).