Amazon Cognito vs sso

Overview

Amazon Cognito

Stacks616

Followers917

Votes34

sso

Stacks38

Followers89

Votes0

GitHub Stars3.1K

Forks191

Amazon Cognito vs sso: What are the differences?

Introduction: In the world of web development and application security, both Amazon Cognito and SSO (Single Sign-On) come into play to streamline authentication and user management processes. While both serve the purpose of authenticating users, they differ in their approach and functionality.

Integration: One key difference between Amazon Cognito and SSO lies in their integration capabilities. Amazon Cognito is designed to integrate seamlessly with AWS services, making it an ideal choice for applications built on the AWS cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, SSO supports integration with a wide range of applications and platforms beyond the AWS ecosystem, providing flexibility for organizations with diverse environments.
User Pools vs. Identity Providers: Amazon Cognito provides user pools as the primary identity provider, offering user directory functionalities, such as user registration, sign-in, and user profiles. It allows developers to manage the end-to-end user authentication flow. SSO, however, does not provide its own user directory or identity provider. Instead, it acts as a federation service, enabling users to sign in once and access multiple applications within an organization using their existing credentials from external identity providers.
Granularity of Access Controls: Amazon Cognito offers fine-grained access control capabilities through its Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, allowing developers to define specific permissions based on user attributes and conditions. This level of control is beneficial for applications that require precise access restrictions. SSO, in contrast, provides a centralized access control system that can simplify the management of user access across various applications, but may not offer the same level of granularity as Amazon Cognito.
Security and Compliance: Both Amazon Cognito and SSO prioritize security and compliance. Amazon Cognito offers features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption of data at rest and in transit, and compliance with industry standards like GDPR and HIPAA. SSO, being a federation service, allows organizations to enforce security policies and manage user access centrally, ensuring consistent security controls across multiple applications.
User Experience: Another notable difference lies in the user experience aspect. Amazon Cognito provides customizable user authentication flows, allowing developers to tailor the login process according to their application's branding and user experience requirements. SSO, being focused on federated sign-in, offers a simplified user experience by eliminating the need for users to remember multiple usernames and passwords across different applications.
Pricing Structure: Lastly, the pricing structure for Amazon Cognito and SSO differs. Amazon Cognito follows a pay-per-use model, where charges are based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs), as well as additional costs for features like MFA and data storage. SSO, on the other hand, is included as part of AWS Single Sign-On pricing, which is based on a per-user, per-month fee.

In summary, Amazon Cognito is a user directory and authentication service with deep integration into the AWS ecosystem, providing fine-grained access control and flexibility in user authentication flows. SSO, on the other hand, is a federated sign-in service that allows users to authenticate once and access multiple applications, accommodating diverse environments beyond AWS, with centralized access control.

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Advice on Amazon Cognito, sso

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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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon Cognito	sso
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.	The authentication and authorization system BuzzFeed developed to provide a secure, single sign-on experience for access to the many internal web apps used by our employees.
Manage Unique Identities;Work Offline;Store and Sync across Devices;Seamless Guest Access;Safeguard AWS Credentials;Control Access to AWS Resources	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 3.1K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 191
Stacks 616	Stacks 38
Followers 917	Followers 89
Votes 34	Votes 0
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	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Amazon Cognito, sso?

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.

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 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.

Related Comparisons

Amazon Cognito vs sso: What are the differences?

Integration: One key difference between Amazon Cognito and SSO lies in their integration capabilities. Amazon Cognito is designed to integrate seamlessly with AWS services, making it an ideal choice for applications built on the AWS cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, SSO supports integration with a wide range of applications and platforms beyond the AWS ecosystem, providing flexibility for organizations with diverse environments.
User Pools vs. Identity Providers: Amazon Cognito provides user pools as the primary identity provider, offering user directory functionalities, such as user registration, sign-in, and user profiles. It allows developers to manage the end-to-end user authentication flow. SSO, however, does not provide its own user directory or identity provider. Instead, it acts as a federation service, enabling users to sign in once and access multiple applications within an organization using their existing credentials from external identity providers.
Granularity of Access Controls: Amazon Cognito offers fine-grained access control capabilities through its Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, allowing developers to define specific permissions based on user attributes and conditions. This level of control is beneficial for applications that require precise access restrictions. SSO, in contrast, provides a centralized access control system that can simplify the management of user access across various applications, but may not offer the same level of granularity as Amazon Cognito.
Security and Compliance: Both Amazon Cognito and SSO prioritize security and compliance. Amazon Cognito offers features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption of data at rest and in transit, and compliance with industry standards like GDPR and HIPAA. SSO, being a federation service, allows organizations to enforce security policies and manage user access centrally, ensuring consistent security controls across multiple applications.
User Experience: Another notable difference lies in the user experience aspect. Amazon Cognito provides customizable user authentication flows, allowing developers to tailor the login process according to their application's branding and user experience requirements. SSO, being focused on federated sign-in, offers a simplified user experience by eliminating the need for users to remember multiple usernames and passwords across different applications.
Pricing Structure: Lastly, the pricing structure for Amazon Cognito and SSO differs. Amazon Cognito follows a pay-per-use model, where charges are based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs), as well as additional costs for features like MFA and data storage. SSO, on the other hand, is included as part of AWS Single Sign-On pricing, which is based on a per-user, per-month fee.

Amazon Cognito vs sso

Overview