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Amazon Cognito vs Cierge: What are the differences?
What is Amazon Cognito? Securely manage and synchronize app data for your users across their mobile devices. 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.
What is Cierge? Easy magic-link authentication. Cierge is an open source authentication server (OIDC) that handles user signup, login, profiles, managerment, and more. Instead of storing passwords, Cirege uses magic links/codes and external logins to authenticate your users.
Amazon Cognito and Cierge can be categorized as "User Management and Authentication" tools.
Some of the features offered by Amazon Cognito are:
- Manage Unique Identities
- Work Offline
- Store and Sync across Devices
On the other hand, Cierge provides the following key features:
- No passwords
- User management
- External logins
Cierge is an open source tool with 1.22K GitHub stars and 61 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Cierge's open source repository on GitHub.
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 Cierge
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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