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  1. Stackups
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  3. Authentication
  4. User Management And Authentication
  5. Amazon Cognito vs ORY Hydra

Amazon Cognito vs ORY Hydra

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito
Stacks616
Followers917
Votes34
ORY Hydra
ORY Hydra
Stacks23
Followers157
Votes8
GitHub Stars16.6K
Forks1.6K

Amazon Cognito vs ORY Hydra: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare and contrast the key differences between Amazon Cognito and ORY Hydra, two popular identity and access management solutions.

  1. Scalability: Amazon Cognito is a managed service provided by AWS, which ensures highly scalable and reliable user management capabilities. It can handle millions of users without any additional infrastructure setup. On the other hand, ORY Hydra is a flexible open-source identity and OAuth2 provider that can be self-hosted, but its scalability depends on the infrastructure and resources allocated to it.

  2. Feature Set: Amazon Cognito offers a comprehensive set of features including user registration and authentication, user profile management, social logins, multi-factor authentication, and support for native mobile and web applications. ORY Hydra primarily focuses on providing OAuth2 and OpenID Connect services, allowing secure authorization and delegation of access rights.

  3. Integration with AWS Services: Amazon Cognito seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB, providing a unified user management solution. ORY Hydra, being an open-source solution, can be integrated with various platforms and services, but it may require additional custom development and configuration.

  4. Deployment Flexibility: Amazon Cognito is a fully managed service that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, allowing easy deployment and management. ORY Hydra provides more control and flexibility in terms of deployment as it can be self-hosted on-premises or in any cloud environment, giving organizations more control over their infrastructure and data.

  5. Pricing Model: Amazon Cognito follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you are charged based on the number of monthly active users and the amount of data stored. ORY Hydra being an open-source solution offers cost savings, as there are no licensing fees for the software itself. However, organizations need to consider the costs associated with managing the infrastructure and resources for hosting and scaling the solution.

  6. Support and Documentation: With Amazon Cognito, you have access to AWS support and a well-documented set of resources, tutorials, and community forums. ORY Hydra has an active open-source community and documentation, but the level of support depends on the community and available resources.

In summary, the key differences between Amazon Cognito and ORY Hydra lie in scalability, feature set, integration with AWS services, deployment flexibility, pricing model, and support/documentation availability.

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Advice on Amazon Cognito, ORY Hydra

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon Cognito
Amazon Cognito
ORY Hydra
ORY Hydra

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 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.

Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources
OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server;OpenID Connect certified;Flexible User Management;High Performance;Developer Friendly
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
16.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.6K
Stacks
616
Stacks
23
Followers
917
Followers
157
Votes
34
Votes
8
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
    Different Language SDKs not compatible
  • 1
    No recovery codes for MFA
Pros
  • 4
    Open-source
  • 2
    Fully customizable
  • 2
    Scalable
Integrations
No integrations available
ORY Kratos
ORY Kratos
Docker
Docker
Node.js
Node.js
JavaScript
JavaScript
TypeScript
TypeScript
Golang
Golang
Ruby
Ruby
Python
Python
Java
Java
PHP
PHP

What are some alternatives to Amazon Cognito, ORY Hydra?

Auth0

Auth0

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

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.

Let's Encrypt

Let's Encrypt

It is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).

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,

Sqreen

Sqreen

Sqreen is a security platform that helps engineering team protect their web applications, API and micro-services in real-time. The solution installs with a simple application library and doesn't require engineering resources to operate. Security anomalies triggered are reported with technical context to help engineers fix the code. Ops team can assess the impact of attacks and monitor suspicious user accounts involved.

Instant 2FA

Instant 2FA

Add a powerful, simple and flexible 2FA verification view to your login flow, without making any DB changes and just 3 API calls.

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.

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