Amazon Cognito vs Auth0 comparison

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Amazon Cognito

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2024

Auth0 and Amazon Cognito are competing products in the identity management space. Based on user reviews, Auth0 generally has the upper hand in ease of deployment and customer service, while Amazon Cognito is preferred for its comprehensive feature set and tighter integration with other AWS services.

Features: Auth0 is praised for its extensive out-of-the-box authentication options, third-party integrations, and customizable login pages. Amazon Cognito offers seamless integration with AWS services, advanced security features, and high scalability.

Room for Improvement: Auth0 users point out that the documentation can be complex, the platform occasionally has performance issues, and there are concerns about pricing for large-scale applications. Amazon Cognito users report that initial setup is complicated, the service lacks adequate customer support channels, and detailed help documentation is insufficient.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Auth0 is known for its straightforward deployment process and strong, responsive customer service. Amazon Cognito, while rich in features, has a steeper learning curve for deployment, and its customer support is often criticized as slow or unhelpful.

Pricing and ROI: Auth0 users find the pricing model to be more flexible and the platform to deliver better ROI by reducing dev time for authentication solutions. Amazon Cognito has a more predictable pricing structure, but some users feel it can become costlier than anticipated. Its close integration with AWS services might offer long-term cost benefits for existing AWS users.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Cognito vs. Auth0 Report (Updated: March 2025).

Amazon Cognito vs. Auth0

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Cognito

Ranking in Access Management

7th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Auth0

Ranking in Access Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Single Sign-On (SSO) (5th), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Access Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Cognito is 6.6%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Auth0 is 10.0%, down from 13.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Access Management

Featured Reviews

Wojciech Doganowski

Solutions Architect & PMO at AS TV Play Baltics/TV3 Group

International setup localization challenges drive custom development while outsourcing credential management enhances security

We are using it in an international setup where we have multiple services running in multiple countries. Cognito localizes only regarding language, but the service is localized in each country. Cognito has the possibility to render the login screen and all the customer flows related to managing the account. Still, it's useless in an international setup. They are unable to localize these screens, so we had to write our own screens and just use the Cognito API. I hope they will fix this soon because it's useful to rely on already prepared flows for all the account management. As it doesn't work with different languages, rewriting it is quite complicated. Additionally, maybe they could find another step in the price so there is not such a significant jump from the basic to extended functionality. Some flexibility would be helpful.

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Serge Wautier

CTO at Lambda-X Ophthalmics

Simplified integration with helpful support and decent pricing

Auth0 is used as an identity provider for our new SaaS platform to manage the identity of users Auth0 is cost-effective because it provides all the features we need, and it was very easy to integrate into our platform. The documentation is comprehensive, and their support team is highly helpful.…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"What I find most valuable about Amazon Cognito is the single sign-on feature that provides a token for accessing protected APIs."

"This is a scalable solution. If our app or general usage increases, this solution can support it."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its swift authentication."

"The multi-factor authentication setup has room for improvement."

"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are the pre and post-token generation, and the different Cognito triggers. It has lots of functionality and flexibility."

"They offer a permission tool to help us manage multi-factor authentication."

"I appreciate Amazon Cognito's ability to scale with demand and its seamless user verification features."

More Amazon Cognito pros

"It is easily connected and easy to put our app in single sign-on."

"I simply use the JWT from the client on the server side to process requests and push updated profile data to a database/queue as needed and end the process without having to persist data in the web server (sessions)."

"If we had to develop our own and manage it, it would take years of development and maintenance. In those terms, it’s definitely beneficial."

"It is very scalable because it provides a new environment for companies based on their number of users and other factors. The tool can take a lot of users."

"The most valuable feature of the product is scalability."

"It offers stronger security and flexibility with API keys, which are generated on runtime."

"It has improved our organization by providing login authentication for a mobile app."

"It has a lot of customization and out-of-the-box features."

More Auth0 pros

Cons

"Cognito has the possibility to render the login screen and all the customer flows related to managing the account. Still, it's useless in an international setup. They are unable to localize these screens, so we had to write our own screens and just use the Cognito API."

"Amazon Cognito could be improved by making it easier for us to add more data to the token, allowing customization of JWT. It requires a complex program to customize the token currently, however, the UI could support this configuration better."

"I would rate its scalability as five out of ten. Moving users between different pools or accounts creates new identities, which means IDs stored in our database must also be changed."

"There is room for improvement in Amazon Cognito."

"The secure authentication of Amazon Cognito has benefited our company. We were previously using legacy signup systems."

"I believe this product could improve by enriching user profiles."

"What I found generally lacking in AWS is privileged access management (PAM)."

"Cognito triggers can improve by providing more direct use cases rather than giving a white paper. A white paper is not at all interesting, it has too many details. It would be a benefit to provide a smaller document that is summarized. The smaller version would bring microdata, macro data is not helpful."

More Amazon Cognito cons

"The price modelling is a bit confusing on the site and can be costly."

"The product could use a more flexible administration structure"

"When they introduced the Organizations feature they did support different login screens per organization. However, they introduced a dependency between this feature and another called the New Universal Login Experience. The New Experience is a more lightweight login screen, but it is much less customizable. For example, today, we are able to fully customize our login screen and even control the background image according to the time of day. We have code to do that. But we are not able to write code anymore in the New Experience."

"The Management API could be improved so it's easier to get user information."

"This is a costly solution and the price of it should be reduced."

"I find it surprising that there is no access to a standard user profile."

"There is a possibility to improve the machine-to-machine authentication flow. This part of Auth0 is not really well documented, and we could really gain some additional knowledge on that."

"In the past, there was an issue with the multi-tenant where there wasn't the ability to manage them."

More Auth0 cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."

"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."

"The pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."

"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two out of ten."

"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."

"The price of Amazon Cognito is low. The pricing model is based on the users."

"The price of Amazon Cognito is expensive. We are on an annual subscription."

"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."

"The tool is cheaper compared to competing solutions. Those alternatives tended to be more expensive. Consequently, Okta purchased it because it was considerably cheaper. The solution even offered some free services while still providing excellent functionality."

"It is a relatively inexpensive product in the industry."

"I am pretty happy with the pricing model of Auth0. It is very clear for me. Considering our scale, the features that we are using, and additional features that we bought, we still find it great. If you split the costs for the whole year and calculate the number of people you needed to hire, it always comes out to be much lesser than what we would have spent on building our own solution."

"Pricing of Auth0 is a pain point. Their pricing model is very confusing, at least for an enterprise. I don't like their pricing model. I think it's too aggressive. It's not very cheap for a service that only does authentication."

"There are different price levels: B2B, B2C, and enterprise. The basic plan is about $1,500 per month."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Cognito?

The most valuable feature of the solution is its swift authentication.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Cognito?

The basic functionality is reasonably priced, but the extended functionalities, especially the extended security, are quite expensive. There is a significant jump from the basic to the extended fun...

What needs improvement with Amazon Cognito?

What do you like most about Auth0?

It is very scalable because it provides a new environment for companies based on their number of users and other factors. The tool can take a lot of users.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Auth0?

The cost of the solution itself was cost-effective enough that I didn't even need to compare it with EntraID.

What needs improvement with Auth0?

There is no immediate need for improvement. However, better documentation for Salesforce integration is suggested. Multi-factor authentication could be considered for future research.

Microsoft Entra ID vs Amazon Cognito

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Product Reports

Amazon Cognito

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Overview

Amazon Cognito is a simple user identity and data synchronization service that helps you 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. With Amazon Cognito, you can save any kind of data in the AWS Cloud, such as app preferences or game state, without writing any backend code or managing any infrastructure. This means you can focus on creating great app experiences instead of having to worry about building and managing a backend solution to handle identity management, network state, storage, and sync.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Auth0 is a comprehensive identity management solution that securely authenticates and authorizes users on different platforms and applications. It offers seamless integration, easy configuration, and reliable performance for managing identity and access. Users appreciate its flexibility, scalability, and support for multi-factor authentication.

With robust documentation and excellent customer service, Auth0 enables developers to efficiently implement authentication and authorization processes. Its valuable features include easy integration, robust security, seamless single sign-on, and customizable authentication options. Auth0 also enhances organizational operations and productivity by streamlining processes, improving collaboration and communication, reducing errors, and facilitating seamless integration with existing systems.

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

1. Airbnb 2. Accenture 3. Adidas 4. Atlassian 5. Audi 6. Baidu 7. BlackRock 8. Cisco 9. CocaCola 10. Dell 11. eBay 12. FedEx 13. Fiat Chrysler 14. Ford 15. Google 16. Groupon 17. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 18. IBM 19. Intel 20. LinkedIn 21. Mastercard 22. Mercedes Benz23. Microsoft 24. Nike 25. Oracle 26. PayPal 27. Pinterest 28. Qualcomm 29. SAP 30. Spotify 31. Tesla 32. Toyota

Amazon Cognito vs. Auth0