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Amazon Cognito vs Symantec Siteminder comparison

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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
9th
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) (13th), Web Access Management (1st)
 

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 Symantec Siteminder is 3.7%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Cognito2.6%
Symantec Siteminder3.7%
Other93.7%
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

"The solution is proto connective and integrates well with other AWS services."
"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."
"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 federation is one of the most efficient features as the pricing is competitive."
"I would recommend Cognito for users who are already AWS customers."
"Amazon Cognito was particularly helpful and clear to use."
"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."
"It provides end users with SSO to our applications – they log in once and they can access all of our applications."
"It's definitely a good product and you won't go wrong if you choose this product."
"It's really increased the security of our applications, and in some cases, has provided much more security."
"The most valuable feature is the Federation part of Single Sign On, which is customizable and is easily integrated with any customer application or any third party application."
"CA SSO is helping us a lot in providing the access solution to the customers."
"I really like the robust functionality that this solution offers, such as federation, OAuth, security, and multi-tenancy, just to name a few."
"Once it works, it works really well."
"I would totally recommend this product, but I think CA has a really good handle on what the drivers are and where the business is going in terms of application development."
 

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."
"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 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."
"I believe this product could improve by enriching user profiles."
"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"There is room for improvement in Amazon Cognito."
"The MFA related to the solution's side is nonexistent."
"I think Amazon Cognito provides less flexibility to customize at the moment."
"If the reporting feature can be integrated into SSO itself that will be an icing on the cake."
"I would like to see more usability; more customer usability."
"The initial setup of Symantec SiteMinder was a bit tricky. I would rate it a seven on a scale of one to ten, where ten indicates an easy setup."
"The OpenID Connect piece, we would like to see the new technologies baked into the product, as opposed to going out and using a different product to accomplish the same thing."
"It was complex and not at all straightforward. They really need to work on this."
"As we are moving in to the mobility space, this is where we really see SiteMinder and their other product really come together to provide a solution base to a different area where the IoT is coming, the different business communications are happening. All of those things require authentication and we really want to see this product grow into that role."
"The Federation part of CA Single Sign On, it's a bit complex to implement because it involves the SSL certificates, exchange of certificates, and lot of technical details. The documentation misses some important parts of this, so that's the reason it took some time for us to go live."
"We go by agents for authentication; anything relating to agent configuration could be improved, or even agentless security."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."
"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two out of ten."
"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."
"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."
"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 pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"The price is quite comparable to the other enterprise-level solutions in that market."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The licensing is fair for this solution."
"The solution's pricing is competitive."
"CA solutions are generally expensive but for the customer the ROI is big."
"Symantec Siteminder is expensive; they could definitely do better on the price."
"I recommend conducting a PoC on every available product before choose one."
"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
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing 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 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: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.