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Amazon Cognito vs WSO2 Identity Server 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
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Access Management (10th)
WSO2 Identity Server
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Identity and Access Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Amazon Cognito is designed for Access Management and holds a mindshare of 4.1%, down 5.6% compared to last year.
WSO2 Identity Server, on the other hand, focuses on Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), holds 3.0% mindshare, up 2.6% since last year.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Cognito4.1%
Microsoft Entra ID15.1%
Okta Platform10.8%
Other70.0%
Access Management
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
WSO2 Identity Server3.0%
Okta Platform15.5%
Auth0 Platform14.1%
Other67.4%
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)
 

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.
Ritesh_Shah - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Architect at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Utilizing key management and seamless single sign-on integration for enhanced user profile management
WSO2 Identity Server's key management feature stands out as a particularly impactful feature for enhancing security. Additionally, from a user perspective, the self-user portal and user profile management capabilities are highly valuable. It allows users to manage their profiles, change passwords, and offers a self-care portal type of functionality. The single sign-on capability integrates seamlessly with various platforms, including Google, Facebook, LDAP, and Active Directory, which supports rapid product launches.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They offer a permission tool to help us manage multi-factor authentication."
"What I find most valuable about Amazon Cognito is the single sign-on feature that provides a token for accessing protected APIs."
"I rate Amazon Cognito nine out of ten."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"What is quite valuable is that we can outsource storage of the credentials to AWS, and they manage it quite securely."
"Cognito speeds up our development and saves us time."
"The features most valuable to us are the ability to integrate with various IDPs and the capability to sync with multiple applications."
"What I find most valuable about Amazon Cognito is the single sign-on feature that provides a token for accessing protected APIs."
"The keystore feature has been most valuable for us."
"The solution gets the job done, and we don't have to do the main configuration."
"The product's initial setup phase is easy."
"The single sign-on procedure itself, as well as the ability to connect to external user sources such as Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP servers, are the solution's most valuable features."
"Comprehensive ecosystem."
"Some of the valuable features of the solution are the easy integration with processes, such as Single Sign-On. Overall WSO2 is straightforward and does not need customization."
"I am completely satisfied with WSO2 Identity Server and would definitely recommend it to other companies."
"We use the solution for customer identity management, authenticating customers coming in through a web portal."
 

Cons

"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. In the Cognito for each scope, there is a separate endpoint."
"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."
"What I found generally lacking in AWS is privileged access management (PAM)."
"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."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in Amazon Cognito."
"This solution requires extensive knowledge to be used effectively as certain areas of its use are not user friendly."
"The solution's licensing model could be more flexible, and pricing could be improved."
"I found the initial setup to be very complex."
"There needs to be a good support model and easy-to-understand documentation."
"The high availability architecture has to be improved."
"The solution could improve its development from a user perspective."
"The price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Sometimes working with the code is difficult because I search for documentation about the code and how to work with the code, which is where I believe they should improve, by providing some documentation on how to work with the code."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."
"The price of Amazon Cognito is expensive. We are on an annual subscription."
"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."
"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two out of ten."
"The pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."
"We have to take their support, but that is a minimal charge if I'm comparing it to other identity managers."
"At this time we are working with the open-source version."
"I rate the product price an eight out of ten. There is a need to pay more for the extra features provided by the solution."
"They should bring in some good pricing models to host the marketplace."
"I have found the solutions license is priced competitively compared to others."
"WSO2 Identity Server is not an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Transportation Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
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 Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Cognito?
The most valuable feature of the solution is its swift authentication.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Cognito?
The basic functionality is reasonably priced, but the extended functionalities, especially the extended security, are quite expensive. There is a significant jump from the basic to the extended fun...
What needs improvement with Amazon Cognito?
Branding could be improved. When you use the Amazon Cognito domain and have a panel to login the user, I would add more customization options, such as icons or customization to the modal window whi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WSO2 Identity Server?
The pricing is currently the same as the API Manager, so it's not surprising. Since we used it primarily for SSO and the self portal, there were no additional pricing concerns.
What needs improvement with WSO2 Identity Server?
Currently, all required features are supported. If new use cases for artificial intelligence arise, it could be beneficial to incorporate those. However, for our current projects, WSO2 Identity Ser...
What is your primary use case for WSO2 Identity Server?
We deployed WSO2 Identity Server to fulfill our single sign-on (SSO) requirements. Whenever we implement the API Manager, instead of using the API Manager's inbuilt key manager, we use WSO2 Identit...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Nutanix, ELM, AlmavivA, BDigital, StubHub, M-creations, MedVision360
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Okta, Cisco and others in Access Management. Updated: February 2026.
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