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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

"This is a scalable solution. If our app or general usage increases, this solution can support it."
"Cognito speeds up our development and saves us time."
"The federation is one of the most efficient features as the pricing is competitive."
"The solution is proto connective and integrates well with other AWS services."
"What I find most valuable about Amazon Cognito is the single sign-on feature that provides a token for accessing protected APIs."
"Amazon Cognito was particularly helpful and clear to use."
"What is quite valuable is that we can outsource storage of the credentials to AWS, and they manage it quite securely."
"I would recommend Cognito for users who are already AWS customers."
"The initial setup is easy."
"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."
"Since implementing Okta Platform, I have noticed measurable security and operational improvements in our cloud-based workloads."
"My favorite aspect of Okta Platform is that it is really user-friendly."
"Overall, I would rate Okta Customer Identity a ten."
"The main benefits Okta Customer Identity provides to users include single point of login for all applications and single authentication, which saves time and reduces frustration."
"Okta is not only a single sign-on platform but also life cycle management, the core of the identity management platform, and Okta Access Gateway can publish on-premise legacy applications to the cloud."
"They have good push authentications."
 

Cons

"The MFA related to the solution's side is nonexistent."
"Amazon Cognito could improve by simplifying the configuration."
"The setup and configuration can be complex, especially for advanced use cases."
"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 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 think Amazon Cognito provides less flexibility to customize at the moment."
"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."
"What I found generally lacking in AWS is privileged access management (PAM)."
"The only issue with Okta Customer Identity is after the upgrade process; we have some issues with the integration between Okta Customer Identity and Jamf."
"Whenever I write Cypress test cases, we encounter problems with logging in through Okta."
"The training is too costly."
"The integration with third-party tools needs to be improved."
"Its pricing needs improvement."
"All of the governance functionality and privileged account management could be improved."
"Users sometimes have difficulty getting verification codes."
"A room for improvement in Okta Workforce Identity is its price. It could be cheaper."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"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 price of Amazon Cognito is low. The pricing model is based on the users."
"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two out of ten."
"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
"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 expensive. We are on an annual subscription."
"I believe it competes well. The pricing is pretty competitive. I know that Microsoft also provides something similar with its MFA and identity services."
"The product is expensive compared to other vendors."
"The solution’s pricing needs to be reasonable. You are dealing with a lot of components and the pricing is component-based."
"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."
"License is around US$20,000 annually."
"It could be a bit too pricey for small companies. Okta Workforce Identity can add a lot of benefits, but smaller companies may not have a lot of applications that need to be managed by Okta Workforce Identity. In larger organizations, there are more departments, applications, and users to manage. Okta Workforce Identity adds a bit more value to those bigger organizations. In addition to standard licensing fees, there are also additional costs for things"
"The product has a user-based license model."
"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."
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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.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.