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Amazon Cognito vs Okta Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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
11th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Okta Platform
Ranking in Access Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
123
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (1st), Authentication Systems (3rd), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (3rd), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (3rd), Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (1st), AI IT Support (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Access Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Cognito is 2.5%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Okta Platform is 11.5%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Okta Platform11.5%
Amazon Cognito2.5%
Other86.0%
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.
SN
Identity and Access Management Specialist at a university with 10,001+ employees
Automated lifecycle management has cut onboarding times and now drives secure, clean access
Although I am a fan of Okta Platform overall, there are areas where it could improve security outcomes and reduce admin friction. My top improvement areas include the system log and analytics upgrade, which are great for point troubleshooting, but trending and root cause analysis across large tenants still require exporting to SIEM. Verbose queries and long-range retention costs can add up. Additionally, while certificate rotations are better than most, the process is still manual for busy portfolios, especially concerning multi-SP SAML certificate rotations and app metadata drift. Two more buckets of potential improvements for Okta Platform involve user experience and security. There is the issue of push fatigue and prompt sprawl, where users receive multiple prompts across different apps and sessions. I arrived at the rating of eight because the core controls are strong and reliable, but a few operational UX and UI gaps prevent it from being rated higher. The reasons for not giving it a nine or ten include ongoing issues concerning safety and change safety, the complexity of group rules and mappings, and the lack of robustness in policy management. Additionally, there remains a need for more manual involvement than necessary, especially for large portfolios and dual certificate rotation, along with proactive SP data metadata validation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon Cognito was particularly helpful and clear to use."
"I appreciate Amazon Cognito's ability to scale with demand and its seamless user verification features."
"They offer a permission tool to help us manage multi-factor authentication."
"This is a scalable solution. If our app or general usage increases, this solution can support it."
"What I find most valuable about Amazon Cognito is the single sign-on feature that provides a token for accessing protected APIs."
"I rate Amazon Cognito nine out of ten."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its swift authentication."
"It has a wide range of MFA options. I prefer "Okta Verify" out of them all."
"The most valuable features of Okta Customer Identity are there is no infrastructure cost, integrated, has plenty of documentation, and is user-friendly."
"Okta Workforce Identity has helped improve our organization by providing customer identity management, customer onboarding, customer identity stores, workforce provisioning, and single sign-on as one of the primary functions that has been a benefit."
"Implementing Okta has reduced a lot of IT work; I would say it saves hours and hours of work when it comes to single sign-on and the same for user onboarding, offboarding, and group settings."
"We've implemented it for the clients and they're quite happy with it."
"Okta Platform has positively impacted my organization with easy single sign-on, as we need single sign-on multifactor authentication for various things and Okta Platform is very secure."
"The MFA part is the best. MFA provided most of the security that we were looking at with respect to the second level of authentication. Okta Workforce Identity provides a number of options with respect to multifactor authentication, such as the app, phone call, and text. These options provide different ways of logging in for users, and they were a lot more than what we needed. This is certainly a very good feature of Okta Workforce Identity."
"Okta Platform has impacted my organization positively by providing much better security, as it implements the best patterns for security."
 

Cons

"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 secure authentication of Amazon Cognito has benefited our company. We were previously using legacy signup systems."
"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"The ease and simplicity of integration could be improved when using this solution. When using Okta, scope is a single endpoint with a parameter as a scope, but in Cognito, for each scope, there is a separate endpoint."
"You need to evaluate the export users. The multifactor authentication, much less this room for improving the configuration setup of that."
"Amazon Cognito could improve by simplifying the configuration."
"What I found generally lacking in AWS is privileged access management (PAM)."
"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 solution's user interface needs to be improved and made easy."
"I think the setup in the beginning can be a bit of a learning curve."
"When I started, there were some UI challenges. The UI could be improved to make it better because I had to watch many tutorials to become familiar with their UI flow and integrations."
"Okta should have at least a local peering partner for countries that align with or comply with GDPR, so there are no compliance or audit questions."
"My advice for others looking into using Okta Platform is that it is a great solution that works well, but they should pay attention to the cost."
"In my country, there's a lot of stealing of mobile phones, and mobile phones are the authentication device through the Okta application. If someone should steal my mobile phone, which is very common in my country, he or she might have access to my company account. That's my concern."
"The training is too costly."
"I would not say Okta Platform is a cost-effective solution. It is an enterprise-grade solution, so it is comparatively on the higher side in terms of cost."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon Cognito is expensive. We are on an annual subscription."
"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 pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."
"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."
"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two out of ten."
"The price of Amazon Cognito is low. The pricing model is based on the users."
"The solution is really expensive."
"The product is expensive compared to other vendors."
"The cost per user for this solution is really high and could be reduced."
"The pricing for Okta Workforce Identity could still be improved or made cheaper. It costs from 50 to 100 euros a year per user. Okta Workforce Identity has different packages you can choose from, and my previous company had all of them, particularly the full Okta suite."
"License is around US$20,000 annually."
"Price-wise, Okta Workforce Identity is a cheap solution. The overall cost depends on the license since you can negotiate with Okta or any of Okta's partners only if you opt for many licenses."
"Okta's pricing is right where it needs to be and right in the middle of the market."
"The solution’s pricing needs to be reasonable. You are dealing with a lot of components and the pricing is component-based."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
11%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

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 Business51
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise63
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Okta Workforce Identity?
Pricing for Okta is reasonably not that much, however, I don't have access to the commercial aspect.
What needs improvement with Okta Workforce Identity?
Currently, in Okta Workforce Identity we get the two-digit authentication code. Instead of getting the two-digit authentication code, if we had an option to do fingerprint verification, that would ...
What is your primary use case for Okta Workforce Identity?
I don't have many details about Okta Workforce Identity. I use the tool just to sign in to different applications that we have. We basically set up Okta Workforce Identity in our mobile phone. We d...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Okta Customer Identity, Workforce Identity
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
FedEx, Zoom, Takeda, Lululemon Athletica, GrunHub, jetBlue, McKensson, Bain & Company, Engie, Peloton, Sonos, T-Mobile, Hewlett Packard, MGM Resorts, Ally Financial, Priceline, Albertsons, Itercom, Classy, FICO, Kensho, Live Nation, Drata, Rotary, and others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Cognito vs. Okta Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.