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Amazon Cognito vs Microsoft Entra ID 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
Microsoft Entra ID
Ranking in Access Management
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
278
Ranking in other categories
Single Sign-On (SSO) (2nd), Authentication Systems (1st), Identity Management (IM) (3rd), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (2nd)
 

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 Microsoft Entra ID is 9.9%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Entra ID9.9%
Amazon Cognito2.6%
Other87.5%
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.
Stafin Jacob - PeerSpot reviewer
Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Practice Lead at Invoke
Identity has become our central gatekeeper and has provided secure single sign-on for all users
Microsoft Entra ID can improve by focusing more on new passwordless methods and becoming a primary adopter. One feature we would like to see is the ability to have security questions for password resets. I know the current capability is phasing out, so we do not have an alternative method yet. Customers who already use security questions require a smoother transition for that capability to be available. My experience with the deployment has had some challenges, particularly around the Microsoft MFA campaigns. The hardest part is moving users from a different MFA provider to the Microsoft MFA provider, as it ultimately depends on user activity. In large enterprises with numerous users across various geographies, this transition takes time. If there are ways to exert more control around that process, it would improve the situation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I find most valuable about Amazon Cognito is the single sign-on feature that provides a token for accessing protected APIs."
"I appreciate Amazon Cognito's ability to scale with demand and its seamless user verification features."
"I would recommend Cognito for users who are already AWS customers."
"The features most valuable to us are the ability to integrate with various IDPs and the capability to sync with multiple applications."
"Cognito speeds up our development and saves us time."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its swift authentication."
"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 most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"After the move to Azure AD, the security level is high."
"Delegated permissions and federated credentials are valuable features of Entra ID."
"My two preferred features are conditional access and privileged identity management."
"I find the conditional access policies to be the most valuable. They provide a lot of granularity in determining where the users can log in from, how they log in, and what they have access to."
"What I like most about Azure Active Directory is its SSO (single sign-on) feature, as we have a community of users with different IDs and passwords, and this feature helps integrate all these."
"The most valuable features of this solution are security, the conditional access feature, and multifactor authentication."
"The product has helped to improve our security posture."
"We have a history of all our authentications and excellent integration with the Microsoft solutions we use at our company. It runs smoothly in Windows and macOS."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The setup and configuration can be complex, especially for advanced use cases."
"I think Amazon Cognito provides less flexibility to customize at the moment."
"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 secure authentication of Amazon Cognito has benefited our company. We were previously using legacy signup systems."
"I believe this product could improve by enriching user profiles."
"What I found generally lacking in AWS is privileged access management (PAM)."
"We'd like to be able to link to non-Mircosft products, like Linux."
"The stability and reliability of Microsoft Entra ID is assessed as good, other than typical outages that every cloud service provider deals with."
"The deadlines for this feature were set for March, and that has already passed without deployment. We commented that we are still waiting for that, and they commented that they would update us when it is finished, but we haven't received any update about it."
"Four years ago, we had an issue with Azure AD. We wanted to reverse sync from Azure AD to on-prem Active Directory, but we couldn't achieve this. Azure AD could connect only in one way, for example, from your site to Azure. If you needed to do the reverse and connect from Azure to on-prem, there was no way to achieve it. We asked Microsoft, and they told us that they don't support it."
"The most challenging aspect I found was the creation of organizational units and specific domains. They have a tool called Bastion, which is expensive and a little bit confusing."
"Licenses are very expensive."
"The transition from on-prem Active Directory to the Azure Cloud was difficult because there aren't group policy objectives. This is handled differently in the Azure cloud environment."
"Though the installation was seamless, it took longer than expected to be completed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon Cognito is low. The pricing model is based on the users."
"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
"The price of Amazon Cognito is expensive. We are on an annual subscription."
"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 of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two out of ten."
"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."
"I do not have experience with pricing."
"It is bundled with other services and the pricing is quite reasonable."
"I would advise implementing the solution to VIPs and admins; it's affordable, effective, and efficient. I would say training staff on properly using the tool is also essential."
"I think the pricing is efficient, but the licensing is overly complicated and difficult to understand. There are many tricks in the licensing that weigh against us."
"Entra ID is not too bad, but Microsoft licensing generally is insane. Most customers normally buy a bundle license with Microsoft 365, E3, or E5. Out of our 2,000 customers, for 99.9% of our customers, the Entra ID license that they are getting through the part of that would be sufficient. There are some more advanced ones that give you a bit more functionality, but we probably have not had a customer for that. We do not even internally use that ourselves. When you buy the Entra ID license on its own, it is probably three or four pounds. You just get it included in the license."
"Expensive solution, but if you look at the technical benefits it provides, the price for it is decent."
"We are currently on the education plan, so the price is slightly better than the development plan."
"It comes free with the Microsoft account. We have a yearly agreement, and all products are covered under it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
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 Business91
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise162
 

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...
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 Duo for 30 days, and we could not be happier. Duo Security is easy to configure a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Active Directory?
I primarily use Microsoft Entra ID's free tier, so I have not faced any issues with pricing; I hope this free tier remains available for some time.
What needs improvement with Azure Active Directory?
To improve Microsoft Entra ID, I believe it should be openable with third-party applications to use Microsoft Authenticator, which is currently tied to Entra. There should definitely be a way to re...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Azure AD, Azure Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Authenticator
 

Interactive Demo

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Microsoft Entre ID is trusted by companies of all sizes and industries including Walmart, Zscaler, Uniper, Amtrak, monday.com, and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Cognito vs. Microsoft Entra ID and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.