StrongDM alternatives after the Delinea acquisition (2026)
StrongDM is now part of Delinea. The acquisition closed on March 5, 2026, so StrongDM is no longer an independent product, it sits inside Delinea’s enterprise privileged access management suite. If you picked StrongDM because it was the lighter, developer-friendly way to broker access, it’s worth knowing your options, especially on a small team where enterprise PAM is overkill.
Why people are looking for alternatives now
Acquisitions unsettle everyone downstream. Pricing, roadmap, and support all become question marks, and the smaller you are, the more that matters. Delinea’s stated direction is enterprise identity security, which is a fine place to be if you’re a large regulated org and a strange fit if you’re a small team that just wanted access to expire on its own.
None of this means you have to move. It means it’s a reasonable moment to check whether what you’re paying for still matches what you need.
The main StrongDM alternatives
Teleport is the closest like-for-like. It’s a proxy-based access platform with strong support for SSH, Kubernetes, and databases, and it’s the tool most StrongDM users compare against first. The tradeoff is the same one StrongDM had: it’s a gateway your engineers connect through, and at smaller scale that’s often more machinery than the problem needs.
HashiCorp Boundary is the main open-source option. If you want to avoid vendor lock-in and you have the appetite to run it yourself, Boundary brokers access to hosts and services without standing credentials. You trade a license fee for operational work.
If a compliance mandate is what’s driving the decision and you have a security team to operate it, CyberArk and Delinea itself are built for exactly that. For a small team without one, they’re heavy.
Native cloud access is the option people forget. AWS IAM Identity Center plus short-lived credentials covers a surprising amount of what a small team needs, for free, if you’re willing to wire it up. It’s not as smooth as a product, but it’s worth pricing before you buy anything.
A different question for small teams
Every option above is a way to control who gets in. That’s necessary, but it’s only half the problem, and it’s the half StrongDM and its alternatives all center on.
The other half is what a session does once it’s in. Access control decides who connects. Most of these tools record and let you review what a session did, but they don’t stop a legitimate session running a destructive command while it’s happening, and the person who deletes production almost always had legitimate access. This is the same gap we wrote about in should developers have access to production.
Korvalis takes a different approach to both halves, and it’s early, a waitlist today rather than something you can deploy this afternoon. The design is access that expires on its own, plus a guard that watches live sessions and cuts off a destructive one before the command finishes, whether the session belongs to an engineer, a stolen key, a contractor, or an AI agent. The part that matters most for anyone leaving StrongDM is that there’s no proxy. Nothing routes through Korvalis, and your engineers don’t change how they work. It installs inside your own cloud account.
If you need mature multi-protocol brokering right now, Teleport or Boundary are the honest picks. If your reason for leaving is that enterprise PAM is too much machinery for your team, that’s exactly the gap we’re building for.
Which should you pick?
Pick Teleport if you want the closest like-for-like proxy and you’re comfortable running a gateway. Pick HashiCorp Boundary if open source and no lock-in matter more than convenience. Pick CyberArk or Delinea if a compliance mandate is driving the decision and you have a security team. Price out native AWS access before any of them if you’re small and cost-sensitive. And look at Korvalis if the appeal of StrongDM was lightness, and you want access plus a guard on the session without a proxy in the middle.
Frequently asked questions
Is StrongDM still available? Yes, but as part of Delinea’s PAM suite rather than an independent product since the acquisition closed on March 5, 2026.
What is a good alternative for a small team? Something lighter than enterprise PAM: native cloud access with short-lived credentials, HashiCorp Boundary for open source, or a no-proxy approach that watches sessions instead of routing every connection through a gateway.
Why are people switching now? Acquisitions create uncertainty about pricing and roadmap, and Delinea’s focus is enterprise. Teams that chose StrongDM for being lightweight are checking whether that holds.
If a lighter approach without a proxy sounds right, see how Korvalis works or join the waitlist.