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Amazon Cognito

608
912
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34
Okta

414
818
+ 1
65
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Amazon Cognito vs Okta: What are the differences?

Amazon Cognito and Okta are both identity management solutions. Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with AWS and provides user management for AWS-hosted applications. Okta is a standalone platform with versatile IAM capabilities, supporting multi-cloud environments and extensive third-party integrations. Here are the key differences between Amazon Cognito and Okta:

  1. Integration with AWS Services: Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, making it a suitable choice for applications hosted on the AWS cloud platform. It provides seamless integration with other AWS services like AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and Amazon S3. On the other hand, Okta is a standalone identity management platform that can integrate with various cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

  2. User Management and Authentication: Both Amazon Cognito and Okta offer user management and authentication capabilities. However, Amazon Cognito provides user directories that allow you to create and manage user accounts directly within the service. It also supports various authentication methods, including username/password, social login, and multi-factor authentication. Okta, on the other hand, is focused on providing a comprehensive identity and access management (IAM) solution. It offers advanced features like user lifecycle management, role-based access control, and identity federation.

  3. Scalability and Pricing: Amazon Cognito is designed to scale automatically to handle millions of users and requests. It offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you only pay for the active users and authentication requests. Okta, being a dedicated identity management platform, also offers scalability but follows a subscription-based pricing model.

  4. Developer Experience and Customization: Amazon Cognito provides a range of SDKs and libraries for various programming languages, making it easy for developers to integrate authentication and user management into their applications. It also offers pre-built UI components for common authentication flows. Okta provides extensive developer documentation, APIs, and SDKs, allowing developers to customize the user experience and integrate Okta's capabilities into their applications.

In summary, Amazon Cognito is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem and provides user management and authentication features suitable for AWS-hosted applications. Okta, on the other hand, is a standalone identity management platform that offers more versatility in multi-cloud or hybrid environments, with advanced IAM features and extensive integrations with third-party services.

Decisions about Amazon Cognito and Okta
Brent Maxwell
Migrated
from
Amazon CognitoAmazon Cognito
to
Auth0Auth0

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.

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Pros of Amazon Cognito
Pros of Okta
  • 14
    Backed by Amazon
  • 7
    Manage Unique Identities
  • 4
    Work Offline
  • 3
    MFA
  • 2
    Store and Sync
  • 1
    Free for first 50000 users
  • 1
    It works
  • 1
    Integrate with Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, SAML
  • 1
    SDKs and code samples
  • 14
    REST API
  • 9
    SAML
  • 5
    OIDC OpenID Connect
  • 5
    Protect B2E, B2B, B2C apps
  • 5
    User Provisioning
  • 5
    Easy LDAP integration
  • 4
    Universal Directory
  • 4
    Tons of Identity Management features
  • 4
    SSO, MFA for cloud, on-prem, custom apps
  • 4
    API Access Management - oAuth2 as a service
  • 3
    Easy Active Directory integration
  • 2
    SWA applications Integration
  • 1
    SOC2
  • 0
    Test

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Cons of Amazon Cognito
Cons of Okta
  • 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
    MFA: there is no "forget device" function
  • 1
    Difficult to customize (basic-pack is more than humble)
  • 1
    Lacks many basic features
  • 1
    There is no "Logout" method in the API
  • 1
    Different Language SDKs not compatible
  • 1
    No recovery codes for MFA
  • 1
    Hard to find expiration times for tokens/codes
  • 1
    Only paid support
  • 5
    Pricing is too high
  • 1
    Okta verify (Multi-factor Authentication)

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What is Amazon Cognito?

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 Okta?

Connect all your apps in days, not months, with instant access to thousands of pre-built integrations - even add apps to the network yourself. Integrations are easy to set up, constantly monitored, proactively repaired and handle authentication and provisioning.

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What companies use Amazon Cognito?
What companies use Okta?
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What tools integrate with Amazon Cognito?
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What are some alternatives to Amazon Cognito and Okta?
Auth0
A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enables Single Sign On and user management to all your applications.
Firebase
Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
AWS IAM
It enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.
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.
Postman
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
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