Admin By Request EPM vs Microsoft Intune EPM: A Detailed Comparison

Note: This blog post was originally published on December 16, 2025, and last updated on October 21, 2026.

If you’re weighing up Endpoint Privilege Management solutions, Microsoft Intune EPM has probably come up. It makes sense: you’re already running Intune, it sits inside your existing environment, and Microsoft is a name everyone trusts.

But being in the box already doesn’t make it the right fit. And if you’re reading this because you’ve already deployed Intune EPM and it isn’t doing what you hoped, you’re in good company. We talk to a lot of teams who started there, ran into the limits, and went looking for something built for the job.

Microsoft Intune EPM handles basic elevation, but it lacks the depth and flexibility enterprise IT teams rely on. Admin By Request EPM was built specifically for privilege management and has been refined over nearly a decade protecting millions of endpoints worldwide. Elevating applications safely is our entire product. For Microsoft, EPM is one small add-on among thousands of items in the catalog.

The good news for anyone already on Intune: switching is painless. You can deploy our agent through Intune itself, so moving over doesn’t mean ripping anything out or learning a new deployment process.

We’ll compare the two products and show you how they work in practice. This comparison focuses on the EPM products themselves. Microsoft customers may have access to other tools that partially cover some of these gaps, such as Windows LAPS for emergency access, though each comes with its own management overhead

Platform Support: Windows-Only vs Multi-Platform

Microsoft Intune EPM works exclusively on Windows endpoints. There’s no macOS or Linux support, and nothing on the roadmap suggests that will change.

The Windows support it does offer is narrower than most people expect. Intune EPM only covers devices that are Entra joined or hybrid joined. It doesn’t support Entra registered devices, on-prem AD only devices or standalone (non-joined) machines, and there’s no Windows Home support. It also doesn’t run on Windows Server. In practice, that limits Intune EPM to Entra or hybrid joined Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise machines, and nothing else.

If your organization runs a mixed environment (and most do), you’re stuck managing privilege elevation through multiple tools. Separate policies, different approval workflows, fragmented audit logs.

Admin By Request EPM supports Windows, macOS, and Linux from a single platform, including Windows Server and ARM-based devices. It covers Entra joined, Entra registered, hybrid, on-prem AD and standalone endpoints, and Intune isn’t a requirement (most leading MDMs, such as Jamf, are supported).

Real-Time Operations vs Delayed Responses

Privilege management is time-critical. When a user needs elevated access to get their job done, every minute of delay costs productivity, and in some settings the cost runs much higher than that. An approval that takes five minutes might be 4:59 minutes too late in environments like healthcare or emergency services.

Microsoft Intune EPM has two built-in delays:

• Policy changes take 20-30 minutes to reach endpoints
• Activity reporting can take up to 24 hours before events appear in the portal

Admin By Request EPM delivers:

• Instant policy update syncing
• Real-time audit log population

Those syncing and reporting delays create real gaps in your security visibility. If something goes wrong, you might not see it in the portal until the next day. Approval speed used to be another major issue with Intune EPM (taking 10-60 minutes), but recent updates have closed that gap, and approval times are now comparable between both products.

Offline use is another gap. Intune EPM has no support for offline elevation with approval, while Admin By Request EPM logs offline elevations and syncs them back to the portal when endpoints reconnect, so there are no audit blind spots.

Deployment and Infrastructure

Microsoft Intune EPM requires a 20MB+ extension on top of your existing Intune infrastructure. If you need to roll back during testing, removing the components from your endpoints can take up to 7 days.

Our EPM agent is 3MB and requires no additional infrastructure beyond the agent itself. Deploy it silently through your existing tools (SCCM, Intune, Jamf), and it configures automatically on install. Removal is straightforward with no waiting period. The same agent also runs our Secure Remote Access solution and Web Access Management, so adding remote support, vendor access or download control doesn’t mean another agent deployment.

The smaller footprint also means lower resource consumption on endpoints and a reduced attack surface.

Security Features: Built-In Protection vs Basic Elevation

Intune EPM requires careful policy design to avoid security gaps. If you allow elevation for tools like CMD, PowerShell, Windows Terminal, or Task Manager, a user can use that access to create their own local admin account, effectively sidestepping the controls EPM is meant to enforce. Microsoft’s reporting won’t show you what commands were run, so with the reporting delay, this can go unnoticed.

There’s also a question of how closely Intune EPM actually holds to the principle of least privilege. Once an application is approved, it can be reused for a 24-hour period without further checks. A genuine least-privilege model grants access for the specific task at hand, then revokes it, rather than leaving a 24-hour window open on an approved app.

Admin By Request EPM integrates OPSWAT MetaDefender, which checks every elevation request against up to 35 antivirus engines in real time. Suspicious or malicious files are automatically blocked or quarantined before elevation happens, regardless of how your policies are set up.

Anti-tamper controls make Admin By Request EPM the only route to admin rights once it’s installed, so users can’t remove or bypass it using the rights it grants. Every elevation is also audited down to the full process tree in real time.

What’s Missing from Microsoft EPM

Microsoft Intune EPM provides application-level elevation through pre-approved rules or manual approval workflows. That covers basic needs, but it’s missing functionality enterprise IT teams use daily:

• Minimal tamper protection: As noted above, users granted elevation for tools like CMD, PowerShell, Terminal, or Task Manager can use that access to create a local admin account and work around EPM’s controls.
• No Support Assist feature: Helpdesk staff can’t context switch into the user’s session, so they typically need full standing admin rights (outside EPM auditing) to perform privileged support tasks
• No Admin Sessions: Users can’t get time-limited, system-wide elevation for tasks that involve multiple elevated operations
• No Break Glass functionality: No emergency access within EPM when a device becomes disjoined from your directory. Windows LAPS is a separate tool, and if the Entra or hybrid join breaks, LAPS stops syncing and the stored password no longer matches the one on the endpoint
• No offline mode: If a device isn’t connected to the network, users can’t elevate anything through EPM
• Limited system elevation support: Struggles with Control Panel, Regedit, and other system-level tools

Admin By Request EPM includes all of these. Support Assist lets helpdesk staff upgrade their permissions temporarily inside a user’s profile, with both accounts logged for audit purposes. Admin Sessions provide time-limited, system-wide elevation when it’s needed. Break Glass generates one-time, time-limited local admin accounts for emergencies. Offline PIN codes allow elevation without network connectivity.

Management at Scale: Sub-Settings vs Policy Sprawl

Microsoft Intune EPM requires you to build policies on a group basis. As your organization grows and different departments need different elevation rules, you quickly end up with dozens (or hundreds) of policies that get difficult to manage.

Admin By Request EPM uses a Sub-Settings architecture. You set global defaults at the tenant level, then create unlimited override groups for specific departments, locations, or use cases. Policies are layered and matched on a first-setting, first-match basis, so you get granular control without the management overhead.

Organizations with 100,000+ endpoints run our platform without needing extra administrators to wrangle policy sprawl.

Support When You Need It

Privilege management sits between users and the work they need to get done, so when something doesn’t behave as expected, a quick answer from people who know the product saves real time for both IT and the end user.

Support is included in the Admin By Request EPM per-endpoint price, with no separate support contract to buy. Our support service levels guarantee a first response within one business day, with tiered escalation for deeper technical issues.

Intune EPM support runs through Microsoft’s general support channels, where EPM is one product among hundreds. Faster access to specialist engineers typically means a paid Microsoft Unified Support contract.

Feature Comparison Table

Licensing Changes in 2026

Since July 2026, Intune EPM has been included in Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions at no additional cost, following Microsoft’s announcement in December 2025. That makes EPM more accessible for organizations already committed to the E5 tier.

EPM was added to the E5 tier specifically, so Microsoft 365 E3 customers don’t get it bundled and still need to license it as a standalone add-on. The pricing changes that took effect July 1, 2026 raised E3 from $36 to $39 per user monthly and E5 from $57 to $60 per user monthly.

Microsoft has also added new EPM features, including a readiness dashboard for deployment oversight, Security Copilot integration for risk assessment before approvals, scope tag enforcement for role-based access control, and approval requests for users who aren’t the device’s primary user.

These additions improve the management experience, but they don’t touch the core technical limitations we’ve laid out here: multi-platform and Windows Server support, broader device join coverage, offline functionality, integrated malware scanning, meaningful tamper protection, and operational features like Support Assist, Admin Sessions, and Break Glass. Microsoft’s strongest move with EPM has been on licensing, not product development.

When Microsoft EPM Makes Sense

Microsoft Intune EPM isn’t the wrong choice for everyone. If your organization runs exclusively on Entra or hybrid joined Windows 11 machines, is already committed to Microsoft 365 E5, and has basic privilege elevation requirements, it might be enough for what you need.

For organizations that need reliable, full-featured privilege management across multiple platforms with advanced security controls, Microsoft’s offering falls short.

Don’t Just Take Our Word for It

Plenty of teams have already made this exact comparison and moved across.

Circet Benelux, one of the fastest-growing international network service providers in the world, is one of them. They found Microsoft EPM wasn’t sufficient for their needs: it took a long time to get policies pushed through, set up new applications, extract hashes, and get decent reporting. With a lot of custom applications that needed local admin rights, the security-versus-convenience question was a real challenge.

After researching the alternatives, Admin By Request came up most often. Once their team tested it, it did what it was supposed to do without hidden pitfalls or heavy overhead. In David Stevens’ words, it was easy to use, approve and audit requests, it updated fast, accepted changes on the fly, and was very granular. They migrated certain groups off local administrator rights with minimal impact, and gave us a customer satisfaction score of 10 out of 10. His advice to other teams: save yourself the hassle of other products, request a trial, set it up, and buy it if you need more than 25 licenses.

It isn’t only customers making the case. Jonathan Edwards, the Microsoft MVP behind the Bearded 365 Guy YouTube channel, has compared the two products directly and reached a similar verdict on where Intune EPM lands as a basic option versus a purpose-built one.

See the Difference Yourself

There are two easy ways to put both products side by side.

Book a demo and we’ll walk you through exactly how Admin By Request EPM handles the things Intune EPM can’t: multi-platform support, instant policy updates, real tamper protection, and features like Support Assist and Break Glass. This is the quickest route if you’re currently on Intune EPM and can’t simply spin up a competing product on the spot.

Or try it yourself. Our free plan covers up to 25 endpoints with full functionality and no time limit. Deploy it in your environment (through Intune, if you like) right alongside Microsoft Intune EPM and compare them directly. The differences tend to show up fast.