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Amazon Cognito vs Cisco Duo comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
9th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Duo
Ranking in Access Management
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
163
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (5th), Authentication Systems (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (2nd), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) (1st), AI Data Analysis (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Access Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Cognito is 2.6%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Duo is 3.1%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Duo3.1%
Amazon Cognito2.6%
Other94.3%
Access Management
 

Featured Reviews

BM
Staff Software Engineer at Visa
Custom authentication has enabled secure multi-factor logins and unified access across apps
The features or capabilities of Amazon Cognito that I have found the most valuable so far include its seamless operation and the requirement of fewer integrations from the client side. All the features are there, enabling us to create the users, manage the groups, and manage access. Mostly, the access management is very good in Amazon Cognito, I would say. The benefits and positive impacts that Amazon Cognito has had in my experience include the fact that earlier we needed to implement so many things on behalf of the product itself. Now, the go-to-market strategy requires less than a week to complete integrations of the user flow, specifically mentioning that a basic authentication flow could be completed in a week itself. We don't have to care about how we manage the passwords, how we manage groups, and how we manage access management because all those things are there. It's handy, the documentation is very good, and it is easy to integrate. That's the reason I would say that the impact AWS is building on the product is great.
Charles Slaustas - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Contractor at Insight global
Supports seamless authentication for users across multiple organizations and personal portals
The features I use in Cisco Duo include Duo Pushes to confirm my identity to the device, and eventually as MFA security was increased, I actually had to use exchange passcodes. Sometimes, I have to go into the site and get into Cisco Duo to retrieve the passcode, and many of them have been two-factor, where the sites send a passcode that I have to enter into Cisco Duo. It has been more of the latter. I have not seen issues with lagging or crashing on Cisco Duo's end; it was usually on the client end, often because someone set up a bad upgrade or there were connection issues with the Cisco Duo cloud through the administrative site.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The solution is proto connective and integrates well with other AWS services."
"This is a scalable solution. If our app or general usage increases, this solution can support it."
"The federation is one of the most efficient features as the pricing is competitive."
"They offer a permission tool to help us manage multi-factor authentication."
"What I find most valuable about Amazon Cognito is the single sign-on feature that provides a token for accessing protected APIs."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"You can do online and offline authentication."
"Cisco Duo has been very reliable from my point of view so far, as I have not had any issues with it."
"Cisco Duo has made us more secure. We've managed to stop some threats with it and keep our users and devices safe."
"Cisco Duo is a simple and effective tool that gives detailed information about users who connect to your domain."
"My impression of Cisco's identity intelligence capability to detect and respond to identity-based risks effectively is that it's a great product."
"Regarding the valuable features, I would say that Duo Security is easy to use, has speed, and is dependable."
"At the moment, the ease of use is what is the best feature for me. Once it has been set up and the security can hoc to my mobile device, it's very simple to use my single sign-on, get prompted for a Duo Security, push, go to my phone, accept the push, and I'm done. It's a very simple process."
"The UI of Cisco Duo is easy to use, especially the web backend, and it's really intuitive and easy to set up."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in Amazon Cognito."
"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."
"The secure authentication of Amazon Cognito has benefited our company. We were previously using legacy signup systems."
"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."
"The MFA related to the solution's side is nonexistent."
"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"I believe this product could improve by enriching user profiles."
"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."
"At the moment, I believe that more integration between Cisco Duo Identity Intelligence and the classic Cisco Duo console can be improved, since it is still a separate platform, and when I click on Identity Intelligence, I have to open a new window and log in again."
"Duo was clearly purchased, and Cisco has a lot of other panels for their Firepower products, et cetera. They need to continue bringing it, Umbrella, and the endpoint pieces even more together and make the integration a little more seamless among all of them."
"I evaluate the stability and reliability of the solution as somewhat tricky. Cisco Duo Access Gateway is mostly VM-based, and while I'm not sure whether there is an on-premises hardware-based solution, having this VM-based solution can be buggy."
"Duo Security should have more customized use cases. For example, if a client needs to have more customization, it would be better to connect directly with Duo's R&D to try to discuss the issues together in order to add customizations."
"When we try to sell Cisco Duo for any license, sometimes customers approach us and say that Cisco Duo is expensive compared to competitors or that the features are not as good."
"My experience with deploying Cisco Duo was a bit rough at first, but after we got it smoothed out, it has worked ever since."
"I would love to see improvements around Identity and Access Management with Cisco Duo, specifically how we can use that as a central source of truth for all of our IAM tools, including Active Directory."
"Cisco can further enhance the integrations, as they possess exceptional integrations with various providers' products and feature sets."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 expensive. We are on an annual subscription."
"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
"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 price of Amazon Cognito is low. The pricing model is based on the users."
"Its price is reasonable. It is not highly expensive."
"Their pricing model is a little bit weird. Currently, there is no price advantage in signing up for yearly contracts. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing costs."
"I believe the licensing model is excellent as it offers flexibility to our customers, allowing them to adopt a crawl, walk, or run approach."
"You pay per user when using this solution and the pricing is fair."
"From a reseller perspective, it's still challenging to explain the whole license strategy to a client, so we really have to be ahead of that for all the true forward conversations."
"Duo Security is free."
"The cost was reasonable. Licensing was pretty straightforward for a change."
"My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Cisco Duo has been great. We've been there for 10 years. While we haven't gone through the setup part for a while, licensing is straightforward and convenient for higher education because student populations are included. So, we don't have to pay extra for it. We just pay for our knowledge workers, which has been great, and the cost is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business64
Midsize Enterprise28
Large Enterprise82
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Cognito?
I am aware that the pricing of Amazon Cognito is not managed by me directly but is managed by some other teams, specifically the DevOps teams. As far as I know, it is based on how many users we hav...
What needs improvement with Amazon Cognito?
I think Amazon Cognito provides less flexibility to customize at the moment. It is very tightly coupled with its own services, so it does not provide customization according to what the client need...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Cognito?
The usual use cases for Amazon Cognito that I have been working with mostly involve working for TLG Apps for three and a half years, where TLG Apps is a FinTech company in the UK. We were working f...
How does Duo Security compare with Microsoft Authenticator?
We switched to Duo Security for identity verification. We’d been using a competitor but got the chance to evaluate Duo for 30 days, and we could not be happier. Duo Security is easy to configure a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Duo Security?
Regarding the pricing, what actually happened was that we got the product purchased through our HQ, so the costing aspect and all those things sit with our HQ. I do not have much information in ter...
What needs improvement with Duo Security?
I do not have a straight answer for how Cisco Duo can be improved at this time. With the implementation that we are going through right now, I was asking a question about how we can use Cisco Duo o...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Duo Security
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Cognito vs. Cisco Duo and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.