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Amazon Cognito vs Auth0: What are the differences?
Amazon Cognito and Auth0 are two popular identity management solutions. These services offer authentication, authorization, and user management capabilities for web and mobile applications. Here are the key differences between Amazon Cognito and Auth0:
Pricing Model: A major difference between Amazon Cognito and Auth0 lies in their pricing models. Amazon Cognito offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you only pay for the active users in your pool and the resources consumed. On the other hand, Auth0 provides a tiered pricing structure based on the number of active users and the features required. This difference in pricing models can impact the cost of using these services, depending on the specific requirements and usage patterns of your application.
Integration with AWS Services: Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with other AWS services, such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon S3. This allows for seamless integration and interaction between these services, making it easier to build a serverless application stack using AWS resources. Auth0, on the other hand, is a standalone service that can be integrated with various platforms and technologies, including AWS, but does not have the same level of native integration with AWS services.
Customizability and Extensibility: Auth0 offers a high degree of customizability and extensibility through its rules engine, allowing developers to implement custom logic and workflows during the authentication process. It provides a flexible architecture to support complex authentication scenarios and allows for easy integration with external identity providers. Amazon Cognito also offers some customization options, but its extensibility is more limited compared to Auth0.
User Management Capabilities: When it comes to user management capabilities, Auth0 provides a more comprehensive set of features out-of-the-box. It offers features like user registration, profile management, password reset, and multi-factor authentication. Amazon Cognito also provides basic user management features but may require additional customization or integration with other AWS services for advanced functionality.
Scalability and Availability: Both Amazon Cognito and Auth0 are designed to be highly scalable and offer high availability. However, as Amazon Cognito is part of the AWS ecosystem, it benefits from the scale and reliability of AWS infrastructure. It provides global availability and automatically handles the scaling of resources based on demand, making it suitable for applications with high user traffic and stringent availability requirements.
Vendor Lock-in: Vendor lock-in is an important consideration when choosing an identity management solution. Auth0 is a standalone service that can be used with various platforms and technologies. This provides more flexibility and reduces the risk of being tied to a specific vendor. On the other hand, Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with AWS services and relies on the AWS ecosystem. While this offers advantages such as seamless integration with other AWS services, it may also lead to vendor lock-in for applications heavily dependent on AWS resources.
In summary, Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, providing scalable user authentication and authorization. Auth0 is a standalone identity platform that offers extensive features and supports multiple platforms, making it a versatile choice for developers looking for cross-platform identity solutions.
Hey all, We're currently weighing up the pros & cons of using Firebase Authentication vs something more OTB like Auth0 or Okta to manage end-user access management for a consumer digital content product. From what I understand so far, Something like Firebase Auth would require more dev effort but is likely to cost less overall, whereas OTB, you have a UI-based console which makes config by non-technical business users easier to manage. Does anyone else have any intuitions or experiences they could share on this, please? Thank you!
Hey, we've had implemented Firebase auth in less than two days. Their doc is amazing and I don't understand why you think that it will take more effort than Auth0. Prices are really good (free, except if you use more than 10k/sms month).
We need to migrate our authentication system to an external solution. We have a Vue.js frontend and a set of Services (mostly in Python) that talk to each other through APIs. This platform is multitenant, having all tenants in the same DB (MongoDB) and discriminating between them with a parameter value. So I'll be grateful if someone can share their experiences with any of these three options!
If these three are your options, I would recommend going with Auth0. They have all functionality available as developer API (Okta e.g. not) so you can manage your instance with Infrastructure as code and can also easily add functionalities relatively easily with the API. They are also really powerful if we're talking about ABAC (Attribute based access control). You can also enrich your access token with custom claims from your MongoDB, that can be probably really useful, as you said that you're dealing with multi tenancy.
We're using Auth0 in combination with Fauna Fauna is a database, so it would challenge you're mongodb. But Faunadb is the first database that implemented a full end user ABAC system directly in the database. (And also a lot easier than the ABAC systems from Okta or Auth0). This helps us, to use Auth0 only as identity platform and doing all the authorization with enriched claims over Fauna. With that you can skip in a lot of the cases you're backend, and you can request directly from the frontend your database (Blazing fast). Also, you can replace in some years Auth0 a lot easier with some upcoming cheaper (Auth0 was bought by Okta for a hilarious price) and "easy to use" passwordless identity provider like Passage.id
Currently, Passport.js repo has 324 open issues, and Jared (the original author) seems to be the one doing most of the work. Also, given that the documentation is not proper. Is it worth using Passport.js?
As of now, StackShare shows it has 29 companies using it. How do you implement auth in your project or your company? Are there any good alternatives to Passport.js? Should I implement auth from scratch?
I would recommend Auth0 only if you are willing to shell out money. You can keep up with their free version only for a very limited time and as per our experience as a growing startup where budget is an issue, their support was not very helpful as they first asked us to sign a commercial agreement even before helping us t o find out whether Auth0 fits our use case or not! But otherwise Auth0 is a great platform to speed up authentication. In our case we had to move to alternatives like Casbin for multi-tenant authorization!
Using Auth0 and JWT with a simple session management server is easy and takes care of a lot of the hassle of setting up authentication. We feel safe having Auth0 handle and store our user data knowing their databases are way more secure than anything we could have setup ourselves. They also provide great tools like WebHooks and action events to pull critical metadata to our API when we need it.
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.