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Amazon Cognito vs Auth0 vs Guardian: What are the differences?
Key differences between Amazon Cognito and Auth0 and Guardian
1. Pricing and Cost: The pricing structure for Amazon Cognito and Auth0 and Guardian differs significantly. Amazon Cognito offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on monthly active users (MAUs), while Auth0 and Guardian have a tiered pricing system based on the number of monthly active users or active connections. This difference in pricing models can significantly impact the cost of using these services for businesses.
2. Integration Options: Auth0 and Guardian provide a wide range of integration options with different platforms and languages, including social login providers such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. On the other hand, Amazon Cognito has built-in integration with AWS services and supports standard protocols like OpenID Connect (OIDC) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). The available integration options can determine the ease of integration and interoperability for developers.
3. Customizability and Branding: Auth0 and Guardian offer more extensive customization options for user interfaces and branding compared to Amazon Cognito. Organizations can customize login and signup experiences, emails, and user workflows to align with their brand identity. In contrast, Amazon Cognito provides limited customization options, primarily focused on basic styling, layout, and logo customization.
4. Security Controls and Compliance: Both Amazon Cognito and Auth0 and Guardian offer security controls, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password strength requirements. However, Amazon Cognito, being an AWS service, inherits the rigorous security and compliance standards of AWS, such as SOC1, SOC2, and ISO 27001. Auth0 and Guardian, on the other hand, are compliant with industry standards like SOC2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA, making them suitable for organizations with specific compliance requirements.
5. Scalability and Performance: Amazon Cognito, as part of the AWS ecosystem, benefits from AWS's robust infrastructure and global presence, which ensures scalability and high-performance capabilities. Auth0 and Guardian also provide scalable solutions, but their performance might rely more on the data centers or regions where their services are deployed. Considerations for scalability and performance should be taken into account based on the target audience and expected user load.
6. Developer Experience and Documentation: Auth0 and Guardian are known for their developer-friendly experience, comprehensive documentation, and extensive community support. With Auth0 and Guardian, developers can easily get started and find resources to troubleshoot specific issues. Amazon Cognito, being an AWS service, has documentation and resources focused on AWS developers, which might require additional familiarity with AWS services and concepts.
In summary, Amazon Cognito and Auth0 and Guardian differ in pricing models, integration options, customization capabilities, security controls and compliance, scalability and performance, and the developer experience and documentation. The choice between these services depends on specific business requirements, budget, preferred integration options, desired level of customization, security and compliance needs, scalability considerations, and developer preferences.
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.
Pros of Amazon Cognito
- Backed by Amazon14
- Manage Unique Identities7
- Work Offline4
- MFA3
- Store and Sync2
- Free for first 50000 users1
- It works1
- Integrate with Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, SAML1
- SDKs and code samples1
Pros of Auth0
- JSON web token70
- Integration with 20+ Social Providers31
- It's a universal solution20
- SDKs20
- Amazing Documentation15
- Heroku Add-on11
- Enterprise support8
- Great Sample Repos7
- Extend platform with "rules"7
- Azure Add-on4
- Easy integration, non-intrusive identity provider3
- Passwordless3
- It can integrate seamlessly with firebase2
- Great documentation, samples, UX and Angular support2
- Polished2
- On-premise deployment2
- Will sign BAA for HIPAA-compliance1
- MFA1
- Active Directory support1
- Springboot1
- SOC21
- SAML Support1
- Great support1
- OpenID Connect (OIDC) Support1
Pros of Guardian
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Cons of Amazon Cognito
- Massive Pain to get working4
- Documentation often out of date3
- Login-UI sparsely customizable (e.g. no translation)2
- Docs are vast but mostly useless1
- MFA: there is no "forget device" function1
- Difficult to customize (basic-pack is more than humble)1
- Lacks many basic features1
- There is no "Logout" method in the API1
- Different Language SDKs not compatible1
- No recovery codes for MFA1
- Hard to find expiration times for tokens/codes1
- Only paid support1
Cons of Auth0
- Pricing too high (Developer Pro)15
- Poor support7
- Rapidly changing API4
- Status page not reflect actual status4
Cons of Guardian
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