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Amazon Cognito vs CyberArk Privileged Access Manager 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
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Access Management (7th)
CyberArk Privileged Access ...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
221
Ranking in other categories
User Activity Monitoring (1st), Enterprise Password Managers (2nd), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (1st), Mainframe Security (2nd), Operational Technology (OT) Security (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

Wojciech Doganowski - PeerSpot reviewer
International setup localization challenges drive custom development while outsourcing credential management enhances security
We are using it in an international setup where we have multiple services running in multiple countries. Cognito localizes only regarding language, but the service is localized in each country. 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 hope they will fix this soon because it's useful to rely on already prepared flows for all the account management. As it doesn't work with different languages, rewriting it is quite complicated. Additionally, maybe they could find another step in the price so there is not such a significant jump from the basic to extended functionality. Some flexibility would be helpful.
Lasantha Wijesinghe - PeerSpot reviewer
We have visibility and control through real-time user behavior analytics
It took us some time to realize its benefits because there was a learning curve for us. It took us about a year to get our heads around this product and start effectively using it. It is a journey. It takes at least five years for any company to make this product very useful and reach maturity. It is not only the product's fault. The company needs to have a vision, and the company culture needs to go with it. Senior leadership needs to support the vision. You need to have lots of ingredients for success. If everything is in place, you will see success after one year. In the first year, it is a struggle for everybody. My company was bought by a bigger company, and they were very new to privileged access management. Everybody was struggling. The advice I would give is to have a good vision for privileged access management. You need dedicated teams, senior management support, and proper company policies and standards before implementing the solution. Start building knowledge slowly and avoid jumping into the deep end without preparation. I would rate CyberArk Privileged Access Manager a nine out of ten.

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."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are the pre and post-token generation, and the different Cognito triggers. It has lots of functionality and flexibility."
"Cognito speeds up our development and saves us time."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"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."
"The features most valuable to us are the ability to integrate with various IDPs and the capability to sync with multiple applications."
"The multi-factor authentication setup has room for improvement."
"Session monitoring is excellent. It may be the solution's most valuable aspect."
"CyberArk is a very stable product and it's a stable product because it has a simple design and a simple architecture that allows you to leverage the economies of scale across the base of your infrastructure that you already have implemented. It doesn't really introduce any new complex pieces of infrastructure that would make it that much more difficult to scale."
"When we started with RPA, there was a requirement that every credential and the bots themselves be protected through the PAM system. From the get-go, we've had CyberArk in the middle... We've got a pretty robust RPA implementation with our PAM platform. Users, bots, the credentials — everything is managed via our PAM solution."
"Password rotation is the most valuable feature"
"The password vault and session monitoring are useful."
"It has helped from an auditing perspective identify who has access to privileged accounts."
"CyberArk Privileged Access Manager's main benefit is it provides secure access to our servers. There are features to capture the user activity, it provides video recording processing. If the users are logged in to the server, we can see what activities they are performing. It's a very nice tool for Privileged Access Management. They have plenty of useful services and the solution has fulfilled our needs."
"CyberArk makes our environment more secure and prevents possible attacks by compromised accounts."
 

Cons

"The setup and configuration can be complex, especially for advanced use cases."
"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 secure authentication of Amazon Cognito has benefited our company. We were previously using legacy signup systems."
"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."
"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"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."
"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."
"Amazon Cognito could improve by simplifying the configuration."
"The current interface is not very intuitive."
"The major pain point that we have is the capacity of CyberArk due to the sheer volume of NPAs that we are managing. We are a large organization and we have hundreds of thousands of non-personal accounts to manage. We have already found out that there are certain capacity limitations within CyberArk that might introduce performance issues. From my perspective, something that would be valuable would be if the vault could hold more passwords and be more scalable."
"Customers also want CyberArk's pricing to be better so that they can implement it further and have more licenses."
"There was a situation when one of our presidents had an issue, but I can't recall the specifics."
"It would be good to have integrations with other tools and firewalls, such as Zscaler and CrowdStrike. Although I am not fully aware of recent updates, more cross-platform integration would be valuable. A SOC analyst would like to have centralized access in terms of information flowing in even for privileged access management. They would like to have control over everything instead of opening four to five tabs for different sorts of information."
"There was a functionality of the solution that was missing. I had noticed it in Beyond Trust, but not in this solution. But, recently they have incorporated something similar."
"One thing that could be improved is to create of a better alternative for fixing group policy fees. We currently use Microsoft, but they have introduced new policies that may not be compatible."
"I would like to see better automation in granting access, better tools, more efficient tools, to be able to customize the solution that CyberArk provides."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of this solution is good compared to other solutions on the market."
"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."
"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 product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."
"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’s pricing is feasible for enterprise customers. The pricing is expensive for smaller businesses. You need to pay additional costs for service implementation and local support."
"Quite expensive"
"Previously, the pricing was very meager. They started publicizing and advertising the solution, growing CyberArk, as an organization. They also changed their pricing with that growth, e.g., the pricier the product, the more people who will purchase it."
"It's expensive, certainly. But CyberArk is the leader in the market with regards to privileged access management. You pay a lot, but you are paying for the value that is being delivered."
"CyberArk has been Gartner's number-one pick for the past ten years, so you can infer that their pricing is higher than everyone else. When you are the best, you will charge appropriately for it."
"CyberArk DNA is free if you purchase the CyberArk solution. There is no additional charge for CyberArk DNA, which is great."
"CyberArk provides all the features bundled. This is compared to other vendors who provide them as a different license for each functionality."
"The solution is costly but we get what we pay for."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Educational Organization
33%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
We are using it in an international setup where we have multiple services running in multiple countries. Cognito localizes only regarding language, but the service is localized in each country. Cog...
How does Sailpoint IdentityIQ compare with CyberArk PAM?
We evaluated Sailpoint IdentityIQ before ultimately choosing CyberArk. Sailpoint Identity Platform is a solution to manage risks in cloud enterprise environments. It automates and streamlines the m...
What do you like most about CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
The most valuable features of the solution are control and analytics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
With the current model of licensing, for my use cases, sometimes it's hard to convince the management and get budget approvals for it. It's expensive and you're not getting anything new. It's just ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
CyberArk Privileged Access Security, CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Rockwell Automation
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Cognito vs. CyberArk Privileged Access Manager and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.