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Amazon Cognito vs AWS Key Management Service: What are the differences?
Developers describe Amazon Cognito as "Securely manage and synchronize app data for your users across their mobile devices". 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. On the other hand, AWS Key Management Service is detailed as "Easily create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data". AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of your keys. AWS Key Management Service is integrated with other AWS services including Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon Redshift. AWS Key Management Service is also integrated with AWS CloudTrail to provide you with logs of all key usage to help meet your regulatory and compliance needs.
Amazon Cognito can be classified as a tool in the "User Management and Authentication" category, while AWS Key Management Service is grouped under "Data Security Services".
Some of the features offered by Amazon Cognito are:
- Manage Unique Identities
- Work Offline
- Store and Sync across Devices
On the other hand, AWS Key Management Service provides the following key features:
- Centralized Key Management
- Integrated with AWS services
- Encryption for all your applications
"Backed by Amazon" is the top reason why over 11 developers like Amazon Cognito, while over 3 developers mention "Integrated with AWS CloudTrail" as the leading cause for choosing AWS Key Management Service.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon Cognito has a broader approval, being mentioned in 41 company stacks & 13 developers stacks; compared to AWS Key Management Service, which is listed in 27 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
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.
Pros of Amazon Cognito
- Backed by Amazon14
- Manage Unique Identities7
- Work Offline4
- MFA3
- Store and Sync2
- It works1
- Integrate with Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, SAML1
- SDKs and code samples1
- Free for first 50000 users1
Pros of AWS Key Management Service
- Integrated with AWS CloudTrail5
- KMS4
- Backed by Amazon4
- Free0
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Cons of Amazon Cognito
- Massive Pain to get working4
- Documentation often out of date3
- Login-UI sparsely customizable (e.g. no translation)2
- Docs are vast but mostly useless1
- MFA: there is no "forget device" function1
- Difficult to customize (basic-pack is more than humble)1
- Lacks many basic features1
- There is no "Logout" method in the API1
- No recovery codes for MFA1
- Hard to find expiration times for tokens/codes1
- Only paid support1
Cons of AWS Key Management Service
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What is Amazon Cognito?
What is AWS Key Management Service?
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