BeyondTrust was recognized as a PAM Leader in the 2026 KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass for Privileged Access Management. Read the full report to learn:
Why KuppingerCole named BeyondTrust a Leader in all four categories
How BeyondTrust and 35 other vendors were evaluated across key PAM areas
Differentiating strengths and capabilities of BeyondTrust
The 2026 KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass for Privileged Access Management (PAM) provides an independent analysis of PAM drivers and the overall landscape. The report evaluates 36 vendors for their PAM capabilities, and rates vendors across four leadership categories: Product, Innovation, Market, and Overall.
In addition, the report provides spider graphs for each vendor around specific capabilities important to the market, including: Just-in-Time (JIT) Access, Session Management & Monitoring, Credentials, Secrets & Key Management, AI/ML Assistance, Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM), Cloud-native & DevOps Support, Identity Discoverability & Visibility, and Policy-driven Privileged Access Control.
We are proud to announce that the 2026 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for PAM recognized BeyondTrust as Leader across all four categories: Overall, Product, Innovation, and Market.
Some BeyondTrust strengths highlighted in the report include:
Broad PAM security coverage across human and non-human identities (NHIs), including AI agents
Unified visibility and analysis of the entire environment, including on-premises systems, AD, cloud IdPs, CSPs, and SaaS applications
Mature session monitoring for IT and OT, plus advanced JIT and ephemeral access capabilities.
EPM extends least privilege control across major operating systems
Extensive integrations across identity and DevOps ecosystems
Useful dashboards and compliance-aligned reporting
Robust secrets and key discovery and management [Note: BeyondTrust was also recognized as a Leader in the most recent KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass for Enterprise Secrets Management]
“A distinguishing part of BeyondTrust’s recent evolution is the way it combines privilege control with identity analytics rather than treating these as separate domains. Identity Security Insights applies AI and ML to normalize identity data, reduce noise, & produce detections and recommendations with useful context. That same analytical model now extends into AI agents and non-human identities."
—2026 KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass for PAM. May 2026.
“[BeyondTrust] Pathfinder acts as the unifying platform that brings together BeyondTrust’s identity security capabilities across PAM, ITDR, CIEM, and broader identity governance… Pathfinder provides configurable dashboards for high-risk accounts, identity threats, secrets, NHI and AI identities, MITRE ATT&CK®, NIST 800-53, and cloud identity risk."
2026 KuppingerCole Analysts Leadership Compass for PAM. May 2026.
“Being recognized as an Overall Leader in the KuppingerCole PAM Leadership Compass for the sixth consecutive year reflects the sustained investment we’ve made in building a platform that secures every identity—human, machine, and AI agent.”
—Janine Seebeck, CEO, BeyondTrust
Chief Executive Officer & Board Member
As the identity attack surface expands, the PAM space continues to evolve. Privilege now extends beyond the scope of traditional PAM to AI agents, service accounts, automation pipelines, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), workloads, and other machine-driven processes that execute operational tasks continuously. And in many organizations, non-human identities (NHIs) outnumber human users by many multiples. Because they often run autonomously or semi-autonomously and operate with broad permissions, NHIs represent a substantial and increasing portion of the privileged activity occurring inside enterprise environments.
In the report, KuppingerCole Analysts stated: “These changes have expanded the scope of PAM. Traditional PAM solutions focused primarily on credential vaulting, password rotation, and administrative session monitoring. While these functions remain important, they address only a portion of the privileged activity taking place across enterprise infrastructure. Modern PAM solutions extend these capabilities with broader mechanisms for discovering privileged identities, managing credentials and secrets, enforcing policy-driven authorization, providing visibility across environments, leveraging AI and Machine Learning (ML), enabling JIT access, and monitoring privileged actions across systems and services.”
We believe BeyondTrust is at the forefront of this trend, with the first and only purpose-built privilege-centric identity security platform (Pathfinder) that addresses the True Privilege™ of identities. This entails not just seeing and protecting directly assigned privilege, but also identifying, understanding, and addressing all the potential escalation paths that are missed by traditional security toolsets.
Want to learn more? Download the full report today to see what sets BeyondTrust apart from the competition.