What is Amazon Cognito and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Amazon Cognito
- Auth0
A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enables Single Sign On and user management to all your applications. ...
- 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. ...
- 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. ...
- JSON Web Token
JSON Web Token is an open standard that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed. ...
- OAuth2
It is an authorization framework that enables a third-party application to obtain limited access to an HTTP service, either on behalf of a resource owner by orchestrating an approval interaction between the resource owner and the HTTP service, or by allowing the third-party application to obtain access on its own behalf. ...
- Spring Security
It is a framework that focuses on providing both authentication and authorization to Java applications. The real power of Spring Security is found in how easily it can be extended to meet custom requirements. ...
Amazon Cognito alternatives & related posts
Auth0
- JSON web token68
- Integration with 20+ Social Providers31
- It's a universal solution20
- SDKs20
- Amazing Documentation14
- Heroku Add-on11
- Enterprise support8
- Extend platform with "rules"7
- Great Sample Repos7
- Azure Add-on4
- Passwordless3
- Easy integration, non-intrusive identity provider3
- It can integrate seamlessly with firebase2
- Great documentation, samples, UX and Angular support2
- Polished2
- On-premise deployment2
- Will sign BAA for HIPAA-compliance1
- Springboot1
- Active Directory support1
- SAML Support1
- SOC21
- Great support1
- MFA1
- OpenID Connect (OIDC) Support1
- Pricing too high (Developer Pro)14
- Poor support7
- Status page not reflect actual status4
- Rapidly changing API3
related Auth0 posts
Hi Otensia! I'd definitely recommend using the skills you've already got and building with JavaScript is a smart way to go these days. Most platform services have JavaScript/Node SDKs or NPM packages, many serverless platforms support Node in case you need to write any backend logic, and JavaScript is incredibly popular - meaning it will be easy to hire for, should you ever need to.
My advice would be "don't reinvent the wheel". If you already have a skill set that will work well to solve the problem at hand, and you don't need it for any other projects, don't spend the time jumping into a new language. If you're looking for an excuse to learn something new, it would be better to invest that time in learning a new platform/tool that compliments your knowledge of JavaScript. For this project, I might recommend using Netlify, Vercel, or Google Firebase to quickly and easily deploy your web app. If you need to add user authentication, there are great examples out there for Firebase Authentication, Auth0, or even Magic (a newcomer on the Auth scene, but very user friendly). All of these services work very well with a JavaScript-based application.
Hey all, We're currently weighing up the pros & cons of using Firebase Authentication vs something more OTB like Auth0 or Okta to manage end-user access management for a consumer digital content product. From what I understand so far, Something like Firebase Auth would require more dev effort but is likely to cost less overall, whereas OTB, you have a UI-based console which makes config by non-technical business users easier to manage. Does anyone else have any intuitions or experiences they could share on this, please? Thank you!
- REST API13
- SAML9
- OIDC OpenID Connect5
- User Provisioning5
- Easy LDAP integration5
- API Access Management - oAuth2 as a service4
- Universal Directory4
- Protect B2E, B2B, B2C apps4
- SSO, MFA for cloud, on-prem, custom apps3
- Easy Active Directory integration3
- Tons of Identity Management features3
- SWA applications Integration1
- SOC21
- Pricing is too high4
- Okta verify (Multi-factor Authentication)1
related Okta posts
Hey all, We're currently weighing up the pros & cons of using Firebase Authentication vs something more OTB like Auth0 or Okta to manage end-user access management for a consumer digital content product. From what I understand so far, Something like Firebase Auth would require more dev effort but is likely to cost less overall, whereas OTB, you have a UI-based console which makes config by non-technical business users easier to manage. Does anyone else have any intuitions or experiences they could share on this, please? Thank you!
If these three are your options, I would recommend going with Auth0. They have all functionality available as developer API (Okta e.g. not) so you can manage your instance with Infrastructure as code and can also easily add functionalities relatively easily with the API. They are also really powerful if we're talking about ABAC (Attribute based access control). You can also enrich your access token with custom claims from your MongoDB, that can be probably really useful, as you said that you're dealing with multi tenancy.
We're using Auth0 in combination with Fauna Fauna is a database, so it would challenge you're mongodb. But Faunadb is the first database that implemented a full end user ABAC system directly in the database. (And also a lot easier than the ABAC systems from Okta or Auth0). This helps us, to use Auth0 only as identity platform and doing all the authorization with enriched claims over Fauna. With that you can skip in a lot of the cases you're backend, and you can request directly from the frontend your database (Blazing fast). Also, you can replace in some years Auth0 a lot easier with some upcoming cheaper (Auth0 was bought by Okta for a hilarious price) and "easy to use" passwordless identity provider like Passage.id
- Realtime backend made easy367
- Fast and responsive268
- Easy setup240
- Real-time212
- JSON188
- Free132
- Backed by google126
- Angular adaptor82
- Reliable67
- Great customer support35
- Great documentation30
- Real-time synchronization25
- Mobile friendly21
- Rapid prototyping18
- Great security14
- Automatic scaling12
- Freakingly awesome11
- Chat8
- Angularfire is an amazing addition!8
- Super fast development8
- Firebase hosting6
- Awesome next-gen backend6
- Ios adaptor6
- Built in user auth/oauth6
- Speed of light4
- Very easy to use4
- Great3
- Brilliant for startups3
- It's made development super fast3
- Push notification2
- Free hosting2
- Free authentication solution2
- Cloud functions2
- JS Offline and Sync suport2
- Low battery consumption2
- The concurrent updates create a great experience2
- I can quickly create static web apps with no backend2
- Great all-round functionality2
- Easy to use1
- Easy Reactjs integration1
- Free SSL1
- Faster workflow1
- Google's support1
- Simple and easy1
- CDN & cache out of the box1
- Large1
- .net1
- Serverless1
- Good Free Limits1
- Can become expensive31
- No open source, you depend on external company15
- Scalability is not infinite15
- Not Flexible Enough9
- Cant filter queries6
- No Relational Data3
- Very unstable server3
- Too many errors2
- No offline sync2
related Firebase posts
Hi Otensia! I'd definitely recommend using the skills you've already got and building with JavaScript is a smart way to go these days. Most platform services have JavaScript/Node SDKs or NPM packages, many serverless platforms support Node in case you need to write any backend logic, and JavaScript is incredibly popular - meaning it will be easy to hire for, should you ever need to.
My advice would be "don't reinvent the wheel". If you already have a skill set that will work well to solve the problem at hand, and you don't need it for any other projects, don't spend the time jumping into a new language. If you're looking for an excuse to learn something new, it would be better to invest that time in learning a new platform/tool that compliments your knowledge of JavaScript. For this project, I might recommend using Netlify, Vercel, or Google Firebase to quickly and easily deploy your web app. If you need to add user authentication, there are great examples out there for Firebase Authentication, Auth0, or even Magic (a newcomer on the Auth scene, but very user friendly). All of these services work very well with a JavaScript-based application.



























This is my stack in Application & Data
JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB
My Utilities Tools
Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch
My Devops Tools
Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack
My Business Tools
Slack
- Centralized powerful permissions based access23
- Straightforward SSO integration3
- Cloud auth limited to resources, no apps or services1
- No equivalent for on-premise networks, must adapt to AD1
related AWS IAM posts
- It's a open source solution27
- Supports multiple identity provider20
- OpenID and SAML support13
- Easy customisation8
- JSON web token7
- Maintained by devs at Redhat2
- Okta5
- Lack of Code examples for client side4
- Poor client side documentation4
related Keycloak posts
As the access to our global REST-API "Charon" is bound to OAuth2, we use Keycloak inside Quarkus to authenticate and authorize users of our API. It is not possible to perform any un-authenticated requests against this API, so we wanted to make really sure that the authentication/authorization component is absolutely reliable and tested. We found those attributes within Keycloak, so we used it.
I want some good advice on which one I should prefer. (Keycloak or Okta) Since Keycloak is open source, it will be our first preference, but do we face some limitations with this approach? And since our product is SAAS based and we support the following authentications at present. 1. AT DB level 2. 3rd part IDP providers 3. LDAP/AD...
related JSON Web Token posts

















Repost
Overview: To put it simply, we plan to use the MERN stack to build our web application. MongoDB will be used as our primary database. We will use ExpressJS alongside Node.js to set up our API endpoints. Additionally, we plan to use React to build our SPA on the client side and use Redis on the server side as our primary caching solution. Initially, while working on the project, we plan to deploy our server and client both on Heroku . However, Heroku is very limited and we will need the benefits of an Infrastructure as a Service so we will use Amazon EC2 to later deploy our final version of the application.
Serverside: nodemon will allow us to automatically restart a running instance of our node app when files changes take place. We decided to use MongoDB because it is a non relational database which uses the Document Object Model. This allows a lot of flexibility as compared to a RDMS like SQL which requires a very structural model of data that does not change too much. Another strength of MongoDB is its ease in scalability. We will use Mongoose along side MongoDB to model our application data. Additionally, we will host our MongoDB cluster remotely on MongoDB Atlas. Bcrypt will be used to encrypt user passwords that will be stored in the DB. This is to avoid the risks of storing plain text passwords. Moreover, we will use Cloudinary to store images uploaded by the user. We will also use the Twilio SendGrid API to enable automated emails sent by our application. To protect private API endpoints, we will use JSON Web Token and Passport. Also, PayPal will be used as a payment gateway to accept payments from users.
Client Side: As mentioned earlier, we will use React to build our SPA. React uses a virtual DOM which is very efficient in rendering a page. Also React will allow us to reuse components. Furthermore, it is very popular and there is a large community that uses React so it can be helpful if we run into issues. We also plan to make a cross platform mobile application later and using React will allow us to reuse a lot of our code with React Native. Redux will be used to manage state. Redux works great with React and will help us manage a global state in the app and avoid the complications of each component having its own state. Additionally, we will use Bootstrap components and custom CSS to style our app.
Other: Git will be used for version control. During the later stages of our project, we will use Google Analytics to collect useful data regarding user interactions. Moreover, Slack will be our primary communication tool. Also, we will use Visual Studio Code as our primary code editor because it is very light weight and has a wide variety of extensions that will boost productivity. Postman will be used to interact with and debug our API endpoints.




















Overview: To put it simply, we plan to use the MERN stack to build our web application. MongoDB will be used as our primary database. We will use ExpressJS alongside Node.js to set up our API endpoints. Additionally, we plan to use React to build our SPA on the client side and use Redis on the server side as our primary caching solution. Initially, while working on the project, we plan to deploy our server and client both on Heroku. However, Heroku is very limited and we will need the benefits of an Infrastructure as a Service so we will use Amazon EC2 to later deploy our final version of the application.
Serverside: nodemon will allow us to automatically restart a running instance of our node app when files changes take place. We decided to use MongoDB because it is a non relational database which uses the Document Object Model. This allows a lot of flexibility as compared to a RDMS like SQL which requires a very structural model of data that does not change too much. Another strength of MongoDB is its ease in scalability. We will use Mongoose along side MongoDB to model our application data. Additionally, we will host our MongoDB cluster remotely on MongoDB Atlas. Bcrypt will be used to encrypt user passwords that will be stored in the DB. This is to avoid the risks of storing plain text passwords. Moreover, we will use Cloudinary to store images uploaded by the user. We will also use the Twilio SendGrid API to enable automated emails sent by our application. To protect private API endpoints, we will use JSON Web Token and Passport. Also, PayPal will be used as a payment gateway to accept payments from users.
Client Side: As mentioned earlier, we will use React to build our SPA. React uses a virtual DOM which is very efficient in rendering a page. Also React will allow us to reuse components. Furthermore, it is very popular and there is a large community that uses React so it can be helpful if we run into issues. We also plan to make a cross platform mobile application later and using React will allow us to reuse a lot of our code with React Native. Redux will be used to manage state. Redux works great with React and will help us manage a global state in the app and avoid the complications of each component having its own state. Additionally, we will use Bootstrap components and custom CSS to style our app.
Other: Git will be used for version control. During the later stages of our project, we will use Google Analytics to collect useful data regarding user interactions. Moreover, Slack will be our primary communication tool. Also, we will use Visual Studio Code as our primary code editor because it is very light weight and has a wide variety of extensions that will boost productivity. Postman will be used to interact with and debug our API endpoints.
related OAuth2 posts
As the access to our global REST-API "Charon" is bound to OAuth2, we use Keycloak inside Quarkus to authenticate and authorize users of our API. It is not possible to perform any un-authenticated requests against this API, so we wanted to make really sure that the authentication/authorization component is absolutely reliable and tested. We found those attributes within Keycloak, so we used it.
My teammates and I are arguing on which library to use for our local and social authentication in our express app between OAuth2 and Passport. I went for Passport cause I personally like it, and it seems easier to implement with good docs, but some of my teammates think it's less secure than OAuth2. So any advice please would be appreciated. Thanks 🙏🏻
Spring Security
- Java integration3
- Easy to use2