Amazon Cognito vs ORY Kratos

Overview

Amazon Cognito

Stacks616

Followers917

Votes34

ORY Kratos

Stacks14

Followers99

Votes0

GitHub Stars12.5K

Forks1.1K

Amazon Cognito vs ORY Kratos: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare and highlight the key differences between Amazon Cognito and ORY Kratos, two popular authentication and identity management services.

User Management Capabilities: Amazon Cognito provides a comprehensive set of user management capabilities, including user registration, sign-in, and authentication, as well as user profile management. ORY Kratos also offers similar capabilities but with additional features such as password recovery and account verification workflows.
Integration with External Identity Providers: Amazon Cognito enables seamless integration with external identity providers, including popular social media platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. ORY Kratos also offers integration with external identity providers but supports a wider variety of providers, including OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and SAML.
Customization and Extensibility: Amazon Cognito allows developers to customize the user experience by providing pre-built UI components that can be easily integrated into their applications. ORY Kratos, on the other hand, offers a highly customizable user interface and allows developers to build their own user-facing components from scratch, providing more flexibility and control over the user experience.
Pricing Model: Amazon Cognito's pricing is based on a monthly active user (MAU) model, where users are billed based on the number of unique users authenticated in a month. ORY Kratos, on the other hand, follows an open-source model and is free to use, making it a cost-effective option for businesses.
Vendor Lock-in: Amazon Cognito is a proprietary service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which may result in vendor lock-in. ORY Kratos, being an open-source project, allows businesses to have more control and flexibility over their authentication and identity management systems, without being tied to a specific vendor.
Community Support and Documentation: Amazon Cognito has extensive documentation and a large community of developers, providing ample resources for troubleshooting and support. ORY Kratos also has a growing community and documentation, but it may not be as extensive as Amazon Cognito's due to being a newer project.

In summary, Amazon Cognito and ORY Kratos differ in terms of user management capabilities, integration with external identity providers, customization options, pricing model, vendor lock-in, and community support. Businesses should consider these differences based on their specific requirements and preferences when choosing an authentication and identity management solution.

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Advice on Amazon Cognito, ORY Kratos

Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

I started our team on Amazon Cognito because I was a Solutions Architect at AWS and found it really easy to follow the tutorials and get a basic app up and running with it.

When our team started working with it, they very quickly became frustrated because of the poor documentation. After 4 days of trying to get all the basic passwordless auth working, our lead engineer made the decision to abandon it and try Auth0... and managed to get everything implemented in 4 hours.

The consensus was that Cognito just isn't mature enough or well-documented, and that the implementation does not cater for real world use cases the way that it should. I believe Amplify has made some of this simpler, but I would still recommend Auth0 as it's been bulletproof for us, and is a sensible price.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon Cognito	ORY Kratos
You can create unique identities for your users through a number of public login providers (Amazon, Facebook, and Google) and also support unauthenticated guests. You can save app data locally on users’ devices allowing your applications to work even when the devices are offline.	It is a cloud native user management system. It provides user login and registration, multi-factor authentication, and user information storage with a headless API. It is fully configurable and supports a wide range of protocols such as Google Authenticator, and stores user information using JSON Schema.
Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources	Self-service Login and Registration; Multi-Factor Authentication; Account Verification; Account Recovery; Profile and Account Management
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 12.5K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 616	Stacks 14
Followers 917	Followers 99
Votes 34	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 14 Backed by Amazon 7 Manage Unique Identities 4 Work Offline 3 MFA 2 Store and Sync Cons 4 Massive Pain to get working 3 Documentation often out of date 2 Login-UI sparsely customizable (e.g. no translation) 1 Difficult to customize (basic-pack is more than humble) 1 MFA: there is no "forget device" function	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	Python Node.js Java PHP Ruby Golang

What are some alternatives to Amazon Cognito, ORY Kratos?

Auth0

A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enables Single Sign On and user management to all your applications.

Stormpath

Stormpath is an authentication and user management service that helps development teams quickly and securely build web and mobile applications and services.

Keycloak

It is an Open Source Identity and Access Management For Modern Applications and Services. It adds authentication to applications and secure services with minimum fuss. No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users. It's all available out of the box.

Devise

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden

Firebase Authentication

It provides backend services, easy-to-use SDKs, and ready-made UI libraries to authenticate users to your app. It supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Google,

WorkOS

Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code.

OAuth.io

OAuth is a protocol that aimed to provide a single secure recipe to manage authorizations. It is now used by almost every web application. However, 30+ different implementations coexist. OAuth.io fixes this massive problem by acting as a universal adapter, thanks to a robust API. With OAuth.io integrating OAuth takes minutes instead of hours or days.

OmniAuth

OmniAuth is a Ruby authentication framework aimed to abstract away the difficulties of working with various types of authentication providers. It is meant to be hooked up to just about any system, from social networks to enterprise systems to simple username and password authentication.

ORY Hydra

It is a self-managed server that secures access to your applications and APIs with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect. It is OpenID Connect Certified and optimized for latency, high throughput, and low resource consumption.

Kinde

Simple, powerful authentication that you can integrate in minutes. Free your users from passwords with secure and frictionless one click sign up and sign in. Built from the ground up using the best in class security protocols available today.

Related Comparisons

Amazon Cognito vs ORY Kratos: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare and highlight the key differences between Amazon Cognito and ORY Kratos, two popular authentication and identity management services.

User Management Capabilities: Amazon Cognito provides a comprehensive set of user management capabilities, including user registration, sign-in, and authentication, as well as user profile management. ORY Kratos also offers similar capabilities but with additional features such as password recovery and account verification workflows.
Integration with External Identity Providers: Amazon Cognito enables seamless integration with external identity providers, including popular social media platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. ORY Kratos also offers integration with external identity providers but supports a wider variety of providers, including OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and SAML.
Customization and Extensibility: Amazon Cognito allows developers to customize the user experience by providing pre-built UI components that can be easily integrated into their applications. ORY Kratos, on the other hand, offers a highly customizable user interface and allows developers to build their own user-facing components from scratch, providing more flexibility and control over the user experience.
Pricing Model: Amazon Cognito's pricing is based on a monthly active user (MAU) model, where users are billed based on the number of unique users authenticated in a month. ORY Kratos, on the other hand, follows an open-source model and is free to use, making it a cost-effective option for businesses.
Vendor Lock-in: Amazon Cognito is a proprietary service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which may result in vendor lock-in. ORY Kratos, being an open-source project, allows businesses to have more control and flexibility over their authentication and identity management systems, without being tied to a specific vendor.
Community Support and Documentation: Amazon Cognito has extensive documentation and a large community of developers, providing ample resources for troubleshooting and support. ORY Kratos also has a growing community and documentation, but it may not be as extensive as Amazon Cognito's due to being a newer project.

Amazon Cognito vs ORY Kratos

Overview