Amazon Cognito vs F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) comparison

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.

F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is an access management proxy solution for managing global access to the enterprise networks, cloud providers, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Through a single management interface, BIG-IP APM consolidates remote, mobile, network, virtual, and web access. 

BIG-IP APM can also serve as a bridge between modern and classic authentication and authorization protocols and methods. For applications which are unable to support modern authentication and authorization protocols, like SAML and OAuth with OIDC, but which do support classic authentication methods, BIG-IP APM converts user credentials to the appropriate authentication standard supported by the application.

BIG-IP APM Benefits:

• Ease of use
• Flexibility
• Ability to integrate with other systems
• Security features
• Granular access control
• Responsive and helpful support team

BIG-IP APM Features:

• Support for Identity Aware Proxy (IAP) enabling Zero Trust application access
• Context-based authorization with dynamic L4/L7 ACLs
• Integration with third-party MFA solutions
• DTLS 2.0 mode for delivering and securing applications
• SAML 2.0 identity federation support
• Support for OAuth 2.0 authorization protocol
• SSO support for classic authentication (Kerberos, header- based, etc.), credential caching, OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0, and FIDO2 (U2F)
• AAA server authentication and high-availability
• Integration with leading IAM vendor products (Microsoft, Okta, Ping Identity)
• BIG IP Edge Client and F5 Access integrate with VMware Horizon ONE (AirWatch), Microsoft Intune and IBM MaaS360
• Risk-based access leveraging third-party UEBA and risk engines (HTTP Connector)

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by BIG-IP APM users.

Mahmmoud Rabie, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, writes that BIG-IP APM is "A highly stable solution for load balancing, but the initial setup is complex."

Clyde Livingston, Senior Process Specialist at Telstra, says that BIG-IP APM is "Easy to use, useful access remotely, but lacking stability."

Chris Lam, Senior Solution Consultant at Macroview Telecom Limited, states that BIG-IP APM is "Useful for remote access VPN and VPI integration with VMware.