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  1. Stackups
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  3. Authentication
  4. User Management And Authentication
  5. Amazon Cognito vs Auth0 vs Guardian

Amazon Cognito vs Auth0 vs Guardian

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Auth0
Auth0
Stacks1.4K
Followers2.1K
Votes215
Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito
Stacks616
Followers917
Votes34
Guardian
Guardian
Stacks7
Followers18
Votes0

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.

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Advice on Auth0, Amazon Cognito, Guardian

Vaibhav
Vaibhav

Jul 17, 2020

Needs advice

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?

220k views220k
Comments
Ryan
Ryan

Aug 30, 2021

Needs adviceonFirebase AuthenticationFirebase AuthenticationAuth0Auth0OktaOkta

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!

1.16M views1.16M
Comments
Brent
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.

297k views297k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Auth0
Auth0
Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito
Guardian
Guardian

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

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.

Avoid dealing with OAuth logic in your code, and spend more time creating your product. Guardian reduces the OAuth footprint in your code to a single request. Built with modularity in mind, Guardian leverages plugins to handle OAuth flows, should you encounter a flow that Guardian doesn't handle, create a small flow plugin to do so and carry on. Guardian comes with 5 pre-made plugins that cover 99% of OAuth services.

User and Password support with verification and forgot password email workflow; Painless SAML Auth with Enterprises; Integration with 20+ Social Providers; SDKs for all platforms mobile and web; Token-based authentication for APIs
Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources
Perfect for both production and testing;Guardian is centralized and easily configurable to allow multiple environments giving you the flexibility you need
Statistics
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
616
Stacks
7
Followers
2.1K
Followers
917
Followers
18
Votes
215
Votes
34
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 70
    JSON web token
  • 31
    Integration with 20+ Social Providers
  • 20
    SDKs
  • 20
    It's a universal solution
  • 15
    Amazing Documentation
Cons
  • 15
    Pricing too high (Developer Pro)
  • 7
    Poor support
  • 4
    Status page not reflect actual status
  • 4
    Rapidly changing API
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
    Docs are vast but mostly useless
  • 1
    Different Language SDKs not compatible
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Parse
Parse
Firebase
Firebase
Ruby
Ruby
PHP
PHP
Laravel
Laravel
Python
Python
Java
Java
Spring
Spring
No integrations availableNo integrations available

What are some alternatives to Auth0, Amazon Cognito, Guardian?

Stormpath

Stormpath

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

Keycloak

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

Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden

Firebase Authentication

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

WorkOS

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

OAuth.io

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

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

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

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.

Satellizer

Satellizer

Satellizer is a simple to use, end-to-end, token-based authentication module for AngularJS with built-in support for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter authentication providers, plus Email and Password sign-in method. You are not limited to the sign-in options above, in fact you can add any OAuth 1.0 or OAuth 2.0 provider by passing provider-specific information during the configuration step.

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