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Akamai Enterprise Application Access vs Amazon Cognito comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 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

Cisco Duo
Sponsored
Ranking in Access Management
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
176
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)
Akamai Enterprise Applicati...
Ranking in Access Management
19th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (15th), ZTNA as a Service (20th), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (18th)
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
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Access Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Duo is 3.1%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai Enterprise Application Access is 1.4%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Cognito is 2.6%, down from 5.2% 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%
Akamai Enterprise Application Access1.4%
Other92.9%
Access Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
DE
Platform Manager at Globe Telecom
Centralized authentication streamlines global access with single sign-on and auto-scaling for seamless user experience
We use Akamai Enterprise Application Access for centralized authentication for our global customers. It provides a solution for consolidated authentication on our platform. We use the service to manage access for our global consumers, not for remote access for our employees My favorite part of…
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco Duo scales very well with the growing needs of my company; during COVID, when we had a higher number of users, there were no problems at all."
"The product is really amazing, and I think it is one of the best documentation sets I have ever seen."
"Since we onboarded it, since we started using Cisco Duo, we have never had any operational glitch."
"Overall, it provides functionality and security with the two-factor authentication, enabling us to mitigate rogue access requests to our network and giving our workers the ability to work hybridly and tackle day-to-day jobs securely without having to come into the office."
"It has definitely made our company more secure."
"It's a lot easier for our end users to connect to our network. You don't have to type in a code. You get push notifications, that's probably the best thing about it. The fewer clicks they have to do to be online, the better it is. They can easily get into the network and do remote work."
"It is a good solution for hybrid environments and VPN."
"Cisco Duo benefits the company by increasing the security footprint, and it is easy to manage users, disable users, or bypass if needed in case of an emergency."
"The cost and the capability are great."
"Application Access's most valuable feature is the accessibility of enterprise tech protection."
"We've had a good ROI from Application Access."
"My favorite part of the Akamai Enterprise Application Access service is its SSO and auto-scaling capabilities."
"The capability of Akamai Enterprise Application Access is what you're looking for, it's giving you the service that you're looking for. It's simple and doesn't use an agent. It uses LCSD responders, and they have a lot of services around the globe. That's the reason that we were very interested in using it because it has a lot of coverage. This is because it's under the GDS umbrella."
"The solution is very convenient and stable because you don't have to worry about attacks to public IPs or public networks."
"Cognito speeds up our development and saves us time."
"What is quite valuable is that we can outsource storage of the credentials to AWS, and they manage it quite securely."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"End-users find it more annoying than anything else."
"I don't see Cisco Duo playing a significant role in managing agentic AI identities at this moment."
"One issue I see is when the device is offline."
"I rate Cisco Duo an 8 out of 10 because I deduct two points since sometimes Cisco Duo is very slow, or when users are not able to receive the code very fast."
"I cannot think of a specific feature that should be focused on for improvement, but perhaps addressing the trouble we have when people are changing phones would help."
"The pricing for Cisco Duo is kind of okay, but most of the time, your competitor is someone like Microsoft who gives it out for free with their offering, making it tough to argue with customers why they should spend additional dollars to also get Duo to improve their setup, but I think the pricing is fair."
"To improve Cisco Duo, wherever the team can try to reduce the number of clicks an end user needs to go through to authenticate would be good."
"The only thing I can think of to improve for tech support is to have a dedicated engineer but then I would get an engineer that has priorities in one area or another and maybe not the scope I need."
"If you provide enterprise services we have to stop telling the customers it's going to be per users or the transactions. That's not good for the customers, it's good for the vendors."
"We need another approach to bring the solution to the cloud. In addition to Access Management, we would like to see if we can jump into Directories. I think ADs are going to go away and everything is going to be cloud-based and minimize the use of ADs because of the cost and some other dependencies to the cloud. Every time you buy AD it is more hardware, and everything's changing to software. The network's changing, the applications are changing, and for IT it is hard to keep up with it."
"The technical enablement sessions are quite limited, and Akamai could help by providing more of them."
"The solution has two agents so should combine its enterprise application and security access into one agent."
"The pricing could be lower for Akamai Enterprise Application Access."
"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"Amazon Cognito could improve by simplifying the configuration."
"I believe this product could improve by enriching user profiles."
"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."
"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."
"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 setup and configuration can be complex, especially for advanced use cases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You pay per user when using this solution and the pricing is fair."
"Duo Security is free."
"Cisco has the most expensive products because market leaders tend to charge a lot."
"From a business perspective, it is a little bit costly. The licensing is on a per-user basis."
"With regard to pricing, for a small business buying a one off, it's pretty expensive. If it's an enterprise that has thousands of employees, however, it's really nothing to protect your data because if your network goes down or it's breached, you're losing millions of dollars every minute. When it comes to a large enterprise, it's priced where it should be because you're talking business to business. You're not talking business to consumer."
"It is affordable for what's coming to the table with it, but in this day and age, the cost is looked at under a microscope, and companies need to very finely define what is needed versus what is critical. In some cases, it might not be cost-effective for a company to have it. In a lot of other cases, it is the cost of doing business."
"Price wise, it's not cheap, but it's not expensive at all either. It's in the middle."
"It falls in line with everything else."
"Licensing is based on user count."
"The license can be shared based on the number of active users."
"The price is great it is all-inclusive, they use an enterprise cost model. That's what we like compared to other users. This is one of the main attractions of Akamai Enterprise Application Access. It's already an enterprise cost model established with us for services."
"The price of Amazon Cognito is expensive. We are on an annual subscription."
"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."
"The pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"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 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."
"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."
"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business66
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise93
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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 Du...
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 as...
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 g...
What needs improvement with Akamai Enterprise Application Access?
The pricing is a bit expensive for our market. Although it is cheaper compared to alternatives, Akamai Enterprise App...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Enterprise Application Access?
We use Akamai Enterprise Application Access ( /products/akamai-enterprise-application-access-reviews ) for centralize...
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, speci...
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 ...
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 an...
 

Also Known As

Duo Security
Soha
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Bugcrowd, InPowered, Spirent Communications
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Enterprise Application Access vs. Amazon Cognito and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.