Joinly vs ADManager Plus

Where they overlap

Both can take an employee record from an HR system and turn it into an Active Directory account with the right attributes, group memberships and Microsoft 365 licences, and both can deactivate that account when the employee exits. Both cover on-premise Active Directory as well as Entra ID and Microsoft 365. If the requirement is "create and disable AD users from HR without a script", both do it.

Where they differ

• Centre of gravity. ADManager Plus is an Active Directory administration product — delegation, reporting, bulk management, cleanup — with HR-driven provisioning as one of its capabilities. Joinly is the lifecycle: it has no AD reporting suite, and it does not want one. Which you need depends on whether your problem is running Active Directory or keeping access aligned with HR.
• Where the rules live. In Joinly, access is a rule on department, job and location with the reason recorded per assignment, evaluated continuously, and with a hard stop when an evaluation would revoke more than 20% of assignments at once. ADManager Plus describes role-based templates that assign privileges and group memberships at provisioning time. Both are legitimate designs; the difference shows up at the mover — a change of department in HR — and at the audit.
• Beyond the directory. Joinly's workflow continues into Exchange (shared mailbox, delegation), SharePoint, Teams, TOPdesk, Freshservice and any webhook, and a European HR landscape of sources. ADManager Plus lists AD, Exchange, Microsoft 365 and "other connected platforms"; how far that extends is best checked against your own application list.
• Deployment and hosting. Joinly is a hosted service in the EU with an outbound-only agent for on-premise AD. ADManager Plus is ManageEngine software; its public pages ask whether your environment is on-premises, cloud or hybrid, and the deployment options should be checked with them for your case.
• The brake before the write. Joinly's dry run with Excel export, per-run thresholds and read-only mode are documented product features designed for the day the HR export is wrong. We have not found an equivalent described on the ADManager Plus HR integration pages.

How to choose

If your team spends its days administering Active Directory and wants HR-driven provisioning inside that same console, ADManager Plus is a natural fit and Joinly would be an extra tool. If your goal is that every account and every permission in Entra ID, Active Directory and the applications follows HR — with rules you can explain, a brake you can trust and a log an auditor accepts — Joinly is the product built for that, and Active Directory administration stays wherever it is today. Many organisations run both: one to manage the directory, one to keep it honest.