Identity governance is a must-have for security and compliance, but deciding how to implement it can be a bigger challenge than it seems. Do you build your own solution in-house, or do you buy a purpose-built platform like ConductorOne?
On the surface, building your own solution might look appealing. You have talented developers, you understand your environment, and you can tailor it exactly to your needs. But once you factor in the true cost of development, maintenance, and ongoing operations, the numbers tell a different story. Over a five-year period, the build approach can easily cost more than three times as much as buying ConductorOne, and that’s before you consider the opportunity cost of tying up your team.
Here are five reasons why buying ConductorOne beats building your own solution every time.
1. Development and Maintenance Costs
Building an identity governance platform is more than just getting a solution up and running. Your team will also have to keep it running. The initial build requires months of engineering effort for requirements gathering, connector development, core platform creation, and rigorous testing. From there, the hidden costs start stacking up: bug fixes, enhancements, new integrations, and ongoing infrastructure hosting.
Over time, the cost of maintaining your homegrown solution rivals or exceeds the original build investment. That’s a permanent tax on your engineering budget for something that isn’t a core revenue driver for your business. With ConductorOne, the heavy lifting is done for you. We ship new capabilities, integrations, and security updates continuously, so you’re always ahead of the curve without the engineering drain.
2. Purpose-Built Data Model and Policies
Even if you successfully connect all your systems, you still need a strong policy framework to govern access, which is complex to design and maintain. That’s where ConductorOne’s purpose-built data model comes in. It provides a single pane of glass for all identities, clearly mapping access paths and uncovering risky access, orphaned accounts, and inactive users. By modeling complex, nested relationships between applications, resources, and entitlements, the data model gives you complete visibility into who has access to what and why.
ConductorOne gives you a ready-to-go policy engine, designed specifically for identity governance and least privilege enforcement. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every new app, identity type, or compliance framework. You simply configure policies, not code them from scratch. It’s faster, more secure, and easier to maintain.
3. Instant Integration to Managed Systems
One of the biggest time sinks in a build approach is integrating with the dozens (or hundreds) of applications and systems your business relies on. Every integration requires development work, and when APIs change, your team must scramble to update and test them.
ConductorOne comes with a library of pre-built connectors for hundreds of popular SaaS apps, cloud infrastructure providers, and on-prem systems. These connectors are maintained and updated by us, meaning you can roll out governance to a new system in minutes.
4. Automation That Actually Saves Time
Modern identity governance should involve automating the right workflows to reduce risk without slowing your business down. Building automations yourself is complex, especially if you want to handle advanced scenarios like conditional approvals, just-in-time access, or prioritizing high-risk events.
That’s why we built ConductorOne Automations. From instant offboarding to usage-based access revocation, our platform automates the risk reduction playbook so your team can focus on higher-value work.
5. Future-Ready for the AI Identity Explosion
The identity landscape is about to change dramatically. Agentic AI will create a surge in identities that will dwarf traditional workforce counts. An in-house solution designed for today’s scale will struggle to keep pace with this explosion.
ConductorOne is built for what’s coming. Our multi-agent platform can discover, govern, and automate access for every identity—human, non-human, and AI—without slowing down. We’re AI-ready, so your governance strategy stays future-proof.
The Cost Case for Buy Over Build
When you compare the total cost of ownership over five years, the difference is staggering. Depending on the size of your org, building your own platform can easily reach millions when you factor in engineering salaries, infrastructure, and support. ConductorOne delivers all the functionality you need, plus continuous improvement, for a fraction of that cost.
And cost is only part of the picture. With ConductorOne, you get faster time to value, lower operational risk, and the ability to redirect your engineering talent to projects that directly impact your business growth.
If you need identity governance that’s robust, compliant, and future-proof, ConductorOne gives you the capabilities of an enterprise-grade platform without the cost, complexity, and long-term maintenance burden of building it yourself.
Ready to see what ConductorOne can save you? Book a demo.
