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Amazon Cognito vs StrongDM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
StrongDM
Ranking in Access Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (5th)
 

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 StrongDM is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StrongDM0.8%
Amazon Cognito2.5%
Other96.7%
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.
MX
Dev Ops Engineer And Solution Architect at Scania
Centralized access has improved privileged control and now provides strong audit visibility
I believe StrongDM can improve its initial setup and onboarding experience for larger enterprise environments like Scania, where we have a lot of processes. Integrating different teams, access policies, and existing identity workflows requires substantial planning. Additionally, I think the dashboard customization and reporting could be more flexible for operational teams, though new teams find it manageable. Once the platform is fully integrated, it provides significant value. Apart from the onboarding experience, I would also mention that the templates for enterprise onboarding and policy setup could benefit from innovative thinking tailored to organizations managing large AWS and Kubernetes workloads. Enhanced customization in dashboards and reporting would further ease operations and provide better insights.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 solution is proto connective and integrates well with other AWS services."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its swift authentication."
"They offer a permission tool to help us manage multi-factor authentication."
"The multi-factor authentication setup has room for improvement."
"I rate Amazon Cognito nine out of ten."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"I would recommend Cognito for users who are already AWS customers."
"StrongDM replaced the puzzle of different solutions with one single product, which made managing resources more efficient."
"We primarily used StrongDM for access to resources on private networks like EC2 machines, Kubernetes clusters, and various databases."
"The best features in StrongDM are the password rotation capabilities, which I think are pretty cool, and also how you can literally log in to any of the privileged servers through a single platform."
"By adopting StrongDM, we have achieved benefits such as eliminating our weekend outages, streamlining ongoing on-call workflows, enabling seamless migration with POC transitions directly into production with minimal effort, allowing our engineers to use their preferred SQL clients like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Workbench, and facilitating compliance through detailed session logs and query capture for SOC 2 and ISO audits."
"Since using StrongDM, I estimate around a 60% reduction in effort compared to other PAM tools."
"StrongDM positively impacts our organization in many ways, mainly in cost savings from the time saved, and it has significantly improved both security and operational efficiency for us."
"StrongDM has positively impacted my organization by saving me a lot of time as a security auditor, because I have to navigate settings and configurations to check the presence of certain security controls in place."
"The best features in StrongDM are that it is the easiest product in the market for this situation with easy access."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in Amazon Cognito."
"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."
"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."
"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 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 MFA related to the solution's side is nonexistent."
"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"Integration, however, is something which admins configure with StrongDM, and in that area, it can be improved."
"It would be beneficial to have better control and alignment between frequent updates and improved communication regarding possible negative effects on existing customer bases."
"My thoughts on the pricing of StrongDM is that it is expensive."
"I think StrongDM could improve by focusing more on network device management by allowing the addition of PAM for network devices, managing legacy network equipment, or helping to initiate enterprise onboarding where a lot of complex environments and initial setup are required."
"I rate the stability of the product five out of ten because crashes sometimes happen when we are working on it."
"StrongDM lacks the capability for web application injections or password injections, so we need to rely on other tools such as HashiCorp for non-human accounts or DevOps scenarios."
"I think the stability of StrongDM is about four to five due to the occasional crashes that I mentioned."
"I believe StrongDM can improve its initial setup and onboarding experience for larger enterprise environments like Scania, where we have a lot of processes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon Cognito is low. The pricing model is based on the users."
"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."
"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."
"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 pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."
"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
"The licensing is per user per month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
11%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
 

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 Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
 

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 StrongDM?
I cannot disclose the pricing details, but I find it competitive compared to other solutions.
What needs improvement with StrongDM?
StrongDM can be improved in many ways. For example, the access approval workflow could be faster. We face a challenge where we sometimes need temporary access to production but have to wait for an ...
What is your primary use case for StrongDM?
In our environment, we have managed Linux servers, cloud resources, and production systems, and we use StrongDM as a privileged access management solution. StrongDM authenticates users through the ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Cognito vs. StrongDM and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.