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Amazon Cognito vs OAuth2: 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, OAuth2 is detailed as "An open standard for access delegation". 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.
Amazon Cognito and OAuth2 can be primarily classified as "User Management and Authentication" tools.
ChromaDex, Sendhelper Pte Ltd, and Strain Merchant are some of the popular companies that use Amazon Cognito, whereas OAuth2 is used by Ataccama, BookMeBus, and Mubasher.info. Amazon Cognito has a broader approval, being mentioned in 41 company stacks & 13 developers stacks; compared to OAuth2, which is listed in 10 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 OAuth2
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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 OAuth2
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What is Amazon Cognito?
What is OAuth2?
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What companies use Amazon Cognito?
What companies use OAuth2?
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What tools integrate with Amazon Cognito?
What tools integrate with OAuth2?
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