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Amazon Cognito vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2024

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
Symantec Siteminder
Ranking in Access Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (14th), Web Access Management (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 Symantec Siteminder is 3.5%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Cognito2.5%
Symantec Siteminder3.5%
Other94.0%
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.
Muzi Lubisi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior technical Consultant at CA Africa
Improved user experience with seamless integration and easy installation
The feature that I mostly valued is the ease of installation on different systems, especially on Windows. Additionally, it is very beneficial for deploying single sign-on sessions between different windows on a web browser, provided I am connected to the right identity provider. That seamless integration significantly improves user experience and efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would recommend Cognito for users who are already AWS customers."
"They offer a permission tool to help us manage multi-factor authentication."
"I rate Amazon Cognito nine out of ten."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"The features most valuable to us are the ability to integrate with various IDPs and the capability to sync with multiple applications."
"The solution is proto connective and integrates well with other AWS services."
"One of the key benefits of this software is its ease of integration with a wide range of applications, including mobile apps and web applications. This simplifies the process of integration, and it can be seamlessly incorporated with Azure, Kubernetes, and other software systems."
"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."
"It provides end users with SSO to our applications – they log in once and they can access all of our applications."
"It's our single solution for managing user authentication."
"The solution has saved our company from a lot of problems."
"This is the only access management product that I have come across which configures end-to-end and hosts resources."
"Right now, federation that comes out-of-the-box with single sign-on is the most valuable feature that we have, and also scalability."
"That seamless integration significantly improves user experience and efficiency."
"Authentication Authorization for our websites are important because all the sites need authentication for security purposes and that has been handled pretty well all these years with SSO."
"It provides a secure interface and single sign-on to a variety of different applications."
 

Cons

"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"The secure authentication of Amazon Cognito has benefited our company. We were previously using legacy signup systems."
"You need to evaluate the export users. The multifactor authentication, much less this room for improving the configuration setup of that."
"In a future release, we would like to have different methods to validate the characteristic of a user. For example, we would like to use biometric data to analyze the behavior of users."
"I think Amazon Cognito provides less flexibility to customize at the moment."
"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 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."
"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."
"Some of the new protocols, like OAuth 2.0, could be improved."
"We are finding some compatibility issues. We're still working with CA on them."
"I've seen a lot of analytics capability being built in for a number of products. Obviously, I want to be able to use analytics on CA SSO as well."
"I used to get the runaround initially. They would ask us the same four questions all the time."
"I will say the user interface for login is kind of plain. They could make it a little prettier."
"Symantec SiteMinder is not easy to set up and maintain at an infrastructure level."
"The performance could be better. The support could be faster."
"It's not user friendly, but it's very customizable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon Cognito is expensive. We are on an annual subscription."
"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two 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."
"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."
"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."
"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."
"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
"The solution's pricing is competitive."
"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
"The licensing is fair for this solution."
"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
"Siteminder is a little costly. You pay for licensing, and they offer packages, so if you have less users, then you have to buy different products at different prices. If you have more of a user base, then the package is different. They also include other features—for example, if you have a database and you're using Siteminder, then it's good to use a Semantic-specific database, but if you are using less, then you have to purchase the database separately. Whereas if you are going for a bigger license, then it comes within the package. It depends on which plan you are using."
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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
18%
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise69
 

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 needs improvement with Symantec Siteminder?
Symantec Siteminder needs to have adaptive authentication and multi-factor authentication as integrated features. Currently, multi-factor authentication is available as a separate solution, and it ...
What is your primary use case for Symantec Siteminder?
I deploy and support Symantec Siteminder ( /products/symantec-siteminder-reviews ). I have been a partner and reseller.
 

Also Known As

No data available
SiteMinder, CA SSO, Layer7 SiteMinder
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
British Telecom, CoreBlox, DBS, HMS, Itera ASA and Simeo
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Cognito vs. Symantec Siteminder and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.