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The Best Delinea Alternative for Infrastructure Access
Teleport Infrastructure Identity Platform vs Delinea: Key Differences
Learn why organizations trust Teleport to provide modern access for today's infrastructure needs.
Approach to Identity
Legacy PAM solutions haven't kept pace with the rapid changes in application development. Engineers and security teams grapple with the complexity and vulnerabilities of access silos, shared credentials, long-standing privileges, and insecure protocols. Static credentials are prime targets for threat actors, making them a significant security risk.
In contrast, phishing-resistant, cryptographic identities are not only far more secure but also easier to manage, offering a robust solution to these challenges.
Credential-based identity
Delinea manages static credentials like passwords, SSH keys, and API tokens for both human and non-human identities.
Persistent credentials must be inventoried, rotated, and governed continuously, creating ongoing operational overhead. Every identity is treated as a long-lived asset, requiring vaults, access reviews, and manual processes to maintain security.
With Delinea, a CI/CD pipeline might use a long-lived API token stored in a vault to access infrastructure. That token requires regular rotation and auditing to prevent misuse. This secret-centric model not only slows operations but also expands the attack surface, as static credentials remain vulnerable to theft, sprawl, and privilege escalation.
Cryptographic infrastructure identity
Teleport replaces static credentials with ephemeral X.509 certificates for humans, machines, workloads, and AI agents.
Traditional PAM tools treat all non-human identities with the same controls and vaulting logic as passwords. Teleport distinguishes between machines, workloads, and automation, issuing short-lived certificates to each identity type with dynamic provisioning and policy based access.
This eliminates the need for passwords, SSH keys, API tokens, or secret vaulting. Access is granted just-in-time and expires automatically by design, dramatically reducing the window of exposure for potential breaches.
Teleport supports SPIFFE-compliant identity issuance, which supports standards-based certificate-backed mTLS to authenticate and secure communication between workloads and critical infrastructure components. Identities are dynamically provisioned and de-provisioned automatically, enforcing cryptographic identity at every connection to ensure only verified entities can interact with infrastructure.
Approach to Access
Developers often need quick and frequent access to various systems and resources during development and testing. Legacy check-in/check-out approaches introduce delays and reduce productivity.
In contrast, Developers only need to authenticate to Teleport to access the infrastructure resources that they are authorized for.
Secret-based PAM
Delinea’s access model relies on long-lived secrets like passwords, SSH keys, or API tokens to grant privileged access to systems and applications.
These credentials are stored in vaults, rotated manually or via policy, and are retrieved by users or automated processes at runtime. A vault-centric approach can introduce operational overhead as dynamic multicloud, containerized, or ephemeral infrastructure components scale up or down.
For developers and engineers, accessing resources through Delinea’s PAM proxies, VPNs, and vault integrations can complicate access pathways. Simple tasks like connecting to a Kubernetes cluster or a cloud instance may require multiple steps, including PAM gateway transversal, vault lookups, and secret retrievals.
Unified, ephemeral access
Teleport eliminates static credentials by issuing short-lived X.509 certificates for every access request, backed by device trust and cryptographic identity.
Access is granted just-in-time, scoped to specific roles or tasks, and automatically expires, removing the risks of long-standing privileges across all infrastructure without manual overhead. This ephemeral access model reduces the attack surface by design and aligns with core zero trust security principles.
Designed for engineers (by engineers), Teleport integrates natively with tools like kubectl, SSH, CI/CD pipelines, and modern cloud-native environments.
Engineers get instant, on-demand access to servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, and AI-driven workloads without VPNs, bastions, or vaults. A unified access plane across multicloud, containerized, and dynamic infrastructure makes it simple to move between resources without complicated access paths.
Approach to Compliance
Legacy solutions impose cumbersome manual access processes and credential handling workflows that disrupt developer activity. This can lead to "workarounds" that compromise security.
In contrast, Teleport integrates with developer workflows and DevOps tools eliminating the need for separate access paths and credential management.
Reactive compliance
Delinea’s compliance approach focuses on after-the-fact governance through access reviews, entitlement reports, and periodic audits.
Delinea provides visibility into key identity lifecycle events like onboarding, role assignments, and deprovisioning. However, this model still operates using static entitlements and scheduled recertifications, and may require additional integrations in order to satisfy certain compliance requirements.
Delinea offers limited verification of machine, workload, or AI-driven interactions as they occur. Security teams may find themselves reliant on manual reviews and delayed audit trails, making it difficult to enforce least privilege access, detect anomalies, or respond to live threats across complex and dynamic infrastructure environments.
Proactive governance, real-time audit
Teleport enforces continuous, real-time governance by enforcing just-in-time access validation, device trust, and dynamic policies that follow zero trust principles.
With Teleport, every access request is authorized at the point of interaction. All access events are logged to a tamper-evident audit trail, session-recorded, and bound to cryptographic identities. This ensures fully traceable, granular, and audit-ready visibility into who accessed what, when, and how.
Customers use Teleport to simplify their compliance with frameworks like SOC 2, FedRAMP, NIST, and PCI DSS, offering contextual, granular audit trails across the most sensitive and complex engineering systems.
Teleport Infrastructure Identity Platform
Zero Trust Access
On-demand, least-privileged access built on a foundation of cryptographic identity and enforced through zero trust policies
Machine & Workload Identity
Improve infrastructure resiliency by securing machine and workload access without static credentials
Identity Governance
Harden your infrastructure with policy-driven access controls for human and machine identities, just-in-time permissions, and session-level audit
Identity Security
Identify & mitigate risk by monitoring critical infrastructure access in order to protect your most sensitive assets
Works with everything you have
AWS
GCP
Azure
Prometheus
Entra
Puppet
Okta
Buildkite
Windows
Active Directory
Helm
Chef
Ansible
Travis CL
OneLogin
Backstage
...and many more
