Amazon Cognito vs Keycloak

Overview

Amazon Cognito

Stacks616

Followers917

Votes34

Keycloak

Stacks780

Followers1.3K

Votes102

Amazon Cognito vs Keycloak: What are the differences?

Amazon Cognito and Keycloak are both identity management solutions that provide authentication and authorization services. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Integration with Cloud Services: Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with various Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, making it an ideal choice for applications running on the AWS cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, Keycloak is a standalone open-source solution that can be deployed on different platforms, including private clouds and on-premises servers.
Pricing Model: The pricing model of Amazon Cognito is based on active users, where you are charged according to the number of monthly active users. Keycloak, being an open-source solution, has no licensing costs and provides more flexibility in terms of scaling and customizations without incurring additional costs.
Ease of Use and Configuration: Amazon Cognito is known for its ease of use and seamless integration with other AWS services. It provides a simple and intuitive user interface for managing user pools, groups, and app integrations. Keycloak, while offering a similar range of features, may require more configuration and customization to meet specific requirements due to its standalone nature.
User Storage and Management: Amazon Cognito provides built-in user storage and management capabilities, allowing you to create user pools, handle user registration, login, and authentication. Keycloak, on the other hand, does not offer built-in user storage and requires integration with pre-existing external identity providers or databases for user management.
Authentication Providers: Amazon Cognito supports various authentication providers, including social logins (such as Google and Facebook), SAML, and OpenID Connect. Keycloak, being an open-source solution, also supports a wide range of authentication protocols and allows the integration of custom authentication providers.
Support and Documentation: Amazon Cognito is backed by AWS, providing reliable support channels and comprehensive documentation. Keycloak, being open-source, relies on community support, and while the community is vibrant and active, the level of support may vary depending on the availability of community members.

In summary, Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with AWS services, offering seamless authentication and authorization for cloud-based applications, while Keycloak, an open-source identity and access management system, provides a more extensible and self-hosted solution suitable for a variety of environments.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Amazon Cognito, Keycloak

sindhujasrivastava

Jan 16, 2020

Needs advice

I am working on building a platform in my company that will provide a single sign on to all of the internal products to the customer. To do that we need to build an Authorisation server to comply with the OIDC protocol. Earlier we had built the Auth server using the Spring Security OAuth project but since in Spring Security 5.x it is no longer supported we are planning to get over with it as well. Below are the 2 options that I was considering to replace the Spring Auth Server.

Keycloak
Okta
Auth0 Please advise which one to use.

258k views258k

Comments

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

Amazon Cognito	Keycloak
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 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.
Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources	-
Statistics
Stacks 616	Stacks 780
Followers 917	Followers 1.3K
Votes 34	Votes 102
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	Pros 33 It's a open source solution 24 Supports multiple identity provider 17 OpenID and SAML support 12 Easy customisation 10 JSON web token Cons 7 Okta 6 Poor client side documentation 5 Lack of Code examples for client side

What are some alternatives to Amazon Cognito, Keycloak?

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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Amazon Cognito vs Keycloak: What are the differences?

Amazon Cognito and Keycloak are both identity management solutions that provide authentication and authorization services. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Integration with Cloud Services: Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with various Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, making it an ideal choice for applications running on the AWS cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, Keycloak is a standalone open-source solution that can be deployed on different platforms, including private clouds and on-premises servers.
Pricing Model: The pricing model of Amazon Cognito is based on active users, where you are charged according to the number of monthly active users. Keycloak, being an open-source solution, has no licensing costs and provides more flexibility in terms of scaling and customizations without incurring additional costs.
Ease of Use and Configuration: Amazon Cognito is known for its ease of use and seamless integration with other AWS services. It provides a simple and intuitive user interface for managing user pools, groups, and app integrations. Keycloak, while offering a similar range of features, may require more configuration and customization to meet specific requirements due to its standalone nature.
User Storage and Management: Amazon Cognito provides built-in user storage and management capabilities, allowing you to create user pools, handle user registration, login, and authentication. Keycloak, on the other hand, does not offer built-in user storage and requires integration with pre-existing external identity providers or databases for user management.
Authentication Providers: Amazon Cognito supports various authentication providers, including social logins (such as Google and Facebook), SAML, and OpenID Connect. Keycloak, being an open-source solution, also supports a wide range of authentication protocols and allows the integration of custom authentication providers.
Support and Documentation: Amazon Cognito is backed by AWS, providing reliable support channels and comprehensive documentation. Keycloak, being open-source, relies on community support, and while the community is vibrant and active, the level of support may vary depending on the availability of community members.

Amazon Cognito vs Keycloak

Overview