PowerShell: Export Active Directory Group Members

by 131 Comments
How to export Active Directory group members using PowerShell

In this guide, you will learn how to export AD group members to csv. I will show you how to get a list of groups and members with PowerShell and the AD Pro Toolkit.

In this article:

Option 1. Export Group Members to CSV using the AD Pro Toolkit

The AD Pro Toolkit includes multiple AD group member reports that can be export to CSV, Excel or PDF File.

You can Download a Free Trial and try these reports in your own domain.

Step 1. Click on “Group Members Reports” and select “Group Members”.

ad group members report

Step 2. Click “Browse” to select a specific group or OU. By default, the tool will get all groups and members.

select ad group or ou

Step 3. Click the “Columns” button if you want to add or remove user fields.

Step 4. Click “Run” to generate a list of the group members.

Step 5. Click the “Export” button” to export the list to csv.

export group members to csv

You can also get a list of groups a user is a member of by running the “User Groups Report”.

user ad groups report

Get Group Members on one line

This report will display the group and then the members all on one line.

Click on “Group Member Reports” and then Group Members (Single line)

group members in a single row

Nested Groups and Members

To get a list of nested groups and members click the “Nested Groups report. This will list all groups that are members of another group. If the parent group has members, you can expand it to see the list.

nested group and members report

List only Security Group Members

With the toolkit, you can easily filter on any of the columns. In this example, I’ll filter on the group type to list only security groups and members.

Click on the groupType column and select Security.

get security groups

Now the tool will only display security groups and the group members.

list of security groups

The toolkit also includes the following group member reports.

  • Nested groups
  • Nested groups tree view
  • Groups with no members
  • All security groups
  • All distribution groups
  • Recently modified groups
  • Recently created groups

Option 2. Export Group members to CSV with PowerShell

In this example, I’ll use PowerShell to get a list of users in AD groups and export them to CSV.

Step 1: Load the Active Directory Module

To connect and query an AD group with PowerShell the Active Directory module needs to be loaded.

The Active Directory module can be installed with the following methods:

  • RSAT tools installed
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 and above with the AD DS or AD LDS server roles

You can run the following command to see if you have installed.

Get-Module -ListAvailable
powershell module

As you can see, I don’t have the module installed.

If you already have the module loaded then jump to step 2, if not then follow these instructions.

To get the Active Directory module installed on my Windows 10 PC, I will need to download and install the RSAT tools.

With the RSAT tools installed, I run the Get-Module -ListAvailable command again

check powershell ad module

Now I have the module installed, let’s move on to step 2.

RELATED: Tutorial on how to install PowerShell modules

Step 2: Use Get-ADGroup to find the group name

If you already know the name of the group, then skip to step 3.

If you’re not sure what the group name is, you can issue the following PowerShell command to list all Active Directory groups.

Get-ADGroup -filter * | sort name | select name
get-adgroup powershell command list groups

Above, is a screenshot of some of the groups listed in my domain. I had an HR group but wasn’t sure of its complete name, I can see it’s HR full. I’ll use that group in step 3 to list out the members.

Step 3: Use Get-AdGroupMember to list group members

The following PowerShell command will list all members of my HR Full group.

Get-ADGroupMember -identity "HR Full"
get-adgroupmember powershell command

You can see the above command provides more details on the group members than I need.

We can filter out the results and just get the member name with this command.

Get-ADGroupMember -identity "HR Full" | select name
list only group members with powershell

Perfect, now I just need to export this to CSV.

Related: How to export all Users from Active Directory

Step 4: Export group members to CSV file with PowerShell

The last step is to export the results to a CSV file.

This is done by adding Export-csv to our above commands. The full command looks like this.

Get-ADGroupMember -identity "HR Full" | select name | Export-csv -path c:\it\filename.csv -Notypeinformation

Now I have a CSV file of all the members from the HR Full Active Directory group.

csv example of ad group members

Pretty easy right?

Schedule Automatic Group Member Reports

With the AD Pro Toolkit, you can schedule email reports of group members. This will email you a list of groups and members on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

  1. Click on “Scheduler”.
  2. Click “Add”.
  3. Select “Reports” and give the task a name.
  4. Choose a schedule frequency and time.
  5. Select “Groups -> General” and then select “group members”.
  6. Select an OU or specific groups.
  7. For the Ouput options select “Email CSV” or “Save CSV”.

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131 thoughts on “PowerShell: Export Active Directory Group Members”

  1. So, it’s possible to output all users in a single group to a .csv file, but that means you have to know all the groupnames and change the input parameters for the powershell each time. Is it possible to output all users against all groups in a single domain to a .csv

    Groupname1 , , , etc
    Groupname2 , , , etc
    Groupname3

    I’m looking to check the users in each group and export them to excel as single lines for auditing and further analysis.

    Reply

    • This will export the groupName and members on one line.

      # Define the group name
      $groupName = “group1”

      # Retrieve the members of the specified group and join their SamAccountNames into a single string
      $members = (Get-ADGroupMember -Identity $groupName | Select-Object -ExpandProperty SamAccountName) -join “,”

      # Create a custom object with the group name and the members in one cell
      $groupDetails = [PSCustomObject]@{ GroupName = $groupName; GroupMembers = $members }

      # Export the custom object to a CSV file
      $groupDetails | Export-Csv -Path “C:\temp\groups.csv” -NoTypeInformation

      With our software it does this by default. Click “Group Reports” -> General -> All groups. Make sure the members column is added.

      Group members one line

      Reply

  2. This article is so clear and easy to follow. Thank you.
    It works for some groups and for others I see an error “Get-ADGroupMember : Cannot find an object with identity: ‘Pwa xxx’ under: ‘DC=abc,DC=abc,DC=abc’ “.
    I see this has been answered in a previous comment but how do I know the name of the server or domain controller for a particular group?

    Reply

  3. We have multiple domain controllers, how can we get the output for a group in a
    different DC

    Get-ADGroupMember : Cannot find an object with identity: ‘DC2XXYY-ABCD’ under:
    ‘DC=dc2,DC=int,DC=us’.

    the same command works for groups in dc1

    Reply

    • To get group members from a specific domain controller use the -server parameter.

      Get-ADGroupMember -server dc2 -identity “HR Full”

      Reply

  6. Hi Robert Allen,
    can you help please!
    I need a info with all local administrators on servers and computers ,but excluded Domain Admins Group

    Reply

  10. Hi,
    You did a great job!

    I would like to add few details at Step2 if you don’t see the groups, if the AD has azure information protection.
    First you will need to check the name of the group in AD then use the following command in PowerShell:
    Get-ADGroupMember -identity “Group_Name” | select name

    All the best,
    Alex Gheorghisoara

    Reply

  11. This is very clean and retrieves the information I need for a compliance report. However, I have been asked to transpose data such that the export is formatted such that each group becomes a column header, and the columns contains all members of the “header” group. Any help is greatly appreciated.

    Thank you!

    Reply

  15. Hi
    How do I get groups within a nested group please? So I have a parent group, then within that, I have nested groups. I wanted those nested groups (not users)

    Thanks

    Reply

  18. Hi Robert, thank you for sharing all these helpful commands and PS-Scripts.

    I am trying to create a script that will export all users with their manager name to a csv file. (i got this part done already), I used: get-aduser -Filter * -Properties Manager | Select-Object Name,sAMAccountName,Manager | export-csv C:\temp\UsersManagersExample.csv -notypeinformation.

    But also that shows all the membership groups for each user. I am not sure what is the best way to achieve this. Can you help? I am quite sure that there is a way to get this done using powershell.

    So I am trying to get a list of all managers and their reporties plus the membership assigned to each user.

    Thank you in advance!
    Best Regards,

    Fady

    Reply

  19. Thanks ,Its very useful for audit purpose, I have created around 24 .CSV file. How do I can add all in one excel in different tabs in sing excel.

    Thanks again
    Vaibhav Joshi

    Reply

  20. Hi Robert, how would I get a listing of all members in an AD group that has members from 2 different domains (universal group). Is this possible? Thanks.

    Reply

  22. Hi could you point me in the right direction? Any help would be appreciated. At step 3 I’m running into the following error….

    Get-AdGroupMember : An unspecified error has occurred
    At line:1 char:1
    + Get-AdGroupMember -identity GROUP-TESTA
    + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: GROUP-TESTA:ADGroup) [Get-ADGroupMember], ADException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : ActiveDirectoryServer:0,Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.Commands.GetADGroupMember

    Reply

  24. Hi Robert, bit late to the party here. I am doing something similar but I wanted to be able to export only names that do not match part of a string to the CSV e.g names that do not match “admin*”. I can manipulate the CSV afterwards but would be great if I could do it as part of PS.

    Reply

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