Amazon Cognito vs Microsoft Entra ID comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Access Management category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 6.4% mindshare in AM, compared to Microsoft’s 27.3% mindshare. Additionally, 76% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Amazon Cognito

Read 13 Amazon Cognito reviews

2,181 Views
1,823 Comparison Views

76% willing to recommend

Microsoft Entra ID

Read 218 Microsoft Entra ID reviews

10,089 Views
7,357 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon Cognito

Microsoft Entra ID

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2024

Microsoft Entra ID and Amazon Cognito are prominent identity and access management solutions. Users are happier with the integrations and advanced security features of Amazon Cognito, although Microsoft Entra ID excels in ease of deployment and customer service.

Features: Microsoft Entra ID users value its seamless integration with other Microsoft services and its multi-factor authentication features. Amazon Cognito is appreciated for its robust security features and user management capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Entra ID users have noted a desire for more customization options and improved analytics. Amazon Cognito users seek better documentation and a more intuitive setup process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Entra ID is praised for its straightforward deployment and excellent customer service. Amazon Cognito, while powerful, is sometimes viewed as complex to set up, and users report mixed experiences with customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Entra ID users find the setup cost reasonable and report solid ROI due to its seamless integration with existing Microsoft solutions. Amazon Cognito users feel the pricing reflects its advanced features, despite higher initial setup costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Cognito vs. Microsoft Entra ID Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Cognito vs. Microsoft Entra ID

January 2025

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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

6th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Entra ID

Ranking in Access Management

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

218

Ranking in other categories

Single Sign-On (SSO) (1st), Authentication Systems (1st), Identity Management (IM) (1st), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Access Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Cognito is 6.4%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Entra ID is 27.3%, up from 24.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Access Management

Featured Reviews

Erik Aceiro

Solutions Architect III at Raizen

Good integration with AWS services but not feasible for B2C because MFAs are nonexistent

The developer experience for mobile apps is terrible. Documentation is very poor and it is difficult to read the documents available to put things into practice. Our team has issues finding information related to using the solution. SDK and libraries available for mobile apps are terrible. For example, if you use MFA to migrate one user from your database to the pool, you need to use Lambda functions or other methods in AWS to get the solution enabled. It is extremely difficult to put a very, very scalable project into practice. Our team doesn't think you can use the solution for B2C on a large scale. We thought the solution would provide an agile experience but it does not. The solution needs to keep a history of passwords. For example, you should be able to check if customers used the same password in the past when connecting to a company by username and password. This type of feature is a must for our project. The MFA related to the solution's side is nonexistent. MFA should occur on the Facebook or Google side and also on the solution's side. This is a big problem because we have wallets, credit cards, and sensitive data stored for each customer. One layer of security is totally missing.

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Aaron Liang

System engineer at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

Has significantly improved secure access to applications and resources in our environment

Microsoft Entra ID has helped by simplifying our management of permissions for APIs. We are not directly exposing credentials, as we use tokens instead. It has made management easier and more secure, especially in a multi-user environment. The implementation of Microsoft Entra ID significantly improved secure access to applications and resources in our environment, primarily through the widespread use of single-sign-on. Managing API permissions became much easier, as application registration often involves calling an API to utilize services without directly exposing credentials, relying instead on token-based authentication. This streamlined approach benefits end-users by simplifying access while remaining transparent to them. Ultimately, my role focuses on ensuring a smooth and user-friendly experience, even if the underlying technology remains unseen by the end-users. Our company strongly emphasizes passwordless authentication, primarily through device-bound passkeys in Microsoft Authenticator. While administrators with high-privileged accounts utilize YubiKeys and passwords for tasks like accessing Microsoft Graph, we are actively transitioning all other users towards passwordless methods such as Windows Hello biometrics. This approach streamlines authentication and enhances security. Though initial deployment in 2022 presented challenges due to hardware limitations and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the technology has significantly improved and provides a simple and effective user experience.

Read full review

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."

"They offer a permission tool to help us manage multi-factor authentication."

"The multi-factor authentication setup has room for improvement."

"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 the pre and post-token generation, and the different Cognito triggers. It has lots of functionality and flexibility."

"The features most valuable to us are the ability to integrate with various IDPs and the capability to sync with multiple applications."

"The solution is proto connective and integrates well with other AWS services."

More Amazon Cognito pros

"I like Entra's ability to integrate the Active Directory with third-party solutions. It's straightforward. I like the ability to define third-party systems and make the AD the primary identity provider."

"We have a complex scenario with several applications, and we're trying to achieve SSO for most of our applications, but some of our legacy applications don't support SSO or modern protocols. Our core applications are ready for SSO or to be federated. We've centralized our authentication process using Entra ID, so we can collect sign-offs from the users and filter using conditional access."

"My two preferred features are conditional access and privileged identity management."

"The tool's most valuable feature is conditional access."

"Azure Active Directory provides us with identity-based authentication, which secures access at the user level and also integrates with conditional access policies and multi-factor authentication helping to increase the identity security for that person. So, the hacking and leaking of passwords is a secondary problem because you will not authenticate a person with one factor. There is a second factor of authentication available to increase the security premise for your company."

"The most beneficial feature would be the effectiveness of having a hybrid set-up."

"It is a very straightforward implementation."

"The most valuable feature is the single sign-on, which allows any application that is SAML or OAuth compatible to use Azure as an identity provider for seamless sign-in."

More Microsoft Entra ID pros

Cons

"What I found generally lacking in AWS is privileged access management (PAM)."

"The setup and configuration can be complex, especially for advanced use cases."

"You need to evaluate the export users. The multifactor authentication, much less this room for improving the configuration setup of that."

"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 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."

"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."

"The MFA related to the solution's side is nonexistent."

"I believe this product could improve by enriching user profiles."

More Amazon Cognito cons

"Allowing for more customization would be very useful. There is a limited metadata capability. When you look at a user, there are only six pieces of information you can see, but organizations are way more complex, so having that metadata available and being able to use that for dynamic user groups and other policies would be very helpful."

"The quality of support has declined in recent years."

"Azure AD does not support legacy authentication protocols, such as NTLM or Kerberos."

"One thing that they need to improve is the cost."

"Something that can be improved is their user interface"

"Azure Active Directory could improve the two-factor authentication."

"The downside of using a single password to access the entire system is that if those credentials are compromised, the hacker will have full access."

"Generally, everything works pretty well, but sometimes, Azure Active Directory has outages on the Microsoft side of things. These outages really have a very big impact on the users, applications, and everything else because they are closely tied to the Azure AD ecosystem. So, whenever there is an outage, it is really difficult because all things start failing. This happens very rarely, but when it happens, there is a big impact."

More Microsoft Entra ID cons

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."

"The price of Amazon Cognito is expensive. We are on an annual subscription."

"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."

"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."

"It is good. We have Office 365 E3, and then that is tied in with Azure Active Directory. I believe that we only have to pay for our technician-level access or IT department access for Azure Active Directory Premium, which I am sure they call Entra Premium P2 licensing, so it is not a very large cost. We just adopted that, and that gives us a lot of insights into user security that we would not otherwise have."

"We are currently on the education plan, so the price is slightly better than the development plan."

"The product's price is in the midrange."

"This product is sold as part of the enterprise package and our licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"I do not have experience with pricing."

"The pricing depends on the use case and can be negotiated based on volume."

"Microsoft Entra ID service can be quite costly due to its hidden expenses linked to usage."

"I don't pay for it. Going by how I feel, I see the prices for any MFA solution going down because the more different alternatives there are, the cheaper things should be. Microsoft Authenticator app would be the preferred application, but there are too many ways to implement MFA. I don't know how much it cost, but the price should go down."

More Microsoft Entra ID pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

33%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Cognito?

Pricing is considered expensive for smaller organizations. Cognito's pricing was rated seven out of ten due to its cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Cognito?

The setup and configuration can be complex, especially for advanced use cases. A dedicated documentation portal with comprehensive information would be helpful. The user interface could be more int...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Azure Active Directory?

It is very simple. The Active Directory functions are very easy for us. Its integration with anything is very easy. We can easily do third-party multifactor authentication.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Active Directory?

We are an enterprise customer with an enterprise agreement in place with many of our partner companies, so there are no special questions or issues about pricing, setup cost, or licensing.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 16% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 8% of the time

ForgeRock vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 7% of the time

Ping Identity Platform vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 3% of the time

WSO2 Identity Server vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon Cognito Competitors

Microsoft Intune vs Microsoft Entra ID

Compared 11% of the time

Google Cloud Identity vs Microsoft Entra ID

Compared 10% of the time

Okta Workforce Identity vs Microsoft Entra ID

Compared 9% of the time

Auth0 vs Microsoft Entra ID

Compared 6% of the time

SailPoint Identity Security Cloud vs Microsoft Entra ID

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Entra ID Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Cognito

February 2025

Download Amazon Cognito product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Entra ID

February 2025

Download Microsoft Entra ID product report

Also Known As

No data available

Azure AD, Azure Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Authenticator

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Overview

Amazon Cognito is a simple user identity and data synchronization service that helps you securely manage and synchronize app data for your users across their mobile devices. You can create unique identities for your users through a number of public login providers (Amazon, Facebook, and Google) and also support unauthenticated guests. You can save app data locally on users’ devices allowing your applications to work even when the devices are offline. With Amazon Cognito, you can save any kind of data in the AWS Cloud, such as app preferences or game state, without writing any backend code or managing any infrastructure. This means you can focus on creating great app experiences instead of having to worry about building and managing a backend solution to handle identity management, network state, storage, and sync.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Entra ID is used for extending on-premises Active Directory to the cloud, managing application access, enabling multi-factor authentication, and single sign-on. It facilitates policy enforcement and secure access, ensuring centralized identity management across cloud and on-premises resources.

Organizations utilize Microsoft Entra ID for robust user and group management, identity synchronization, and conditional access. Its seamless integration with third-party apps, scalability, and support for remote work make it a preferred choice. The admin center streamlines identity and access tasks, enhancing efficiency and security with features like privileged identity management and audit logs.

What are the key features of Microsoft Entra ID?

Single Sign-On: Simplifies user access to multiple applications with one login.
Multifactor Authentication: Enhances security by requiring additional verification.
Conditional Access: Establishes policies that determine how users' access cloud apps.
Integration: Easily integrates with various third-party applications.
User Identity Protection: Safeguards user identities from threats.
Privileged Identity Management: Manages elevated access to sensitive resources.
Audit Logs: Provides thorough activity logs for oversight and compliance.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Entra ID reviews?

Enhanced Security: Offers strong multifactor authentication and identity protection.
Administrative Efficiency: Simplifies identity and access management tasks.
Scalability: Supports growing user bases and remote work environments.
Integration Capabilities: Compatible with numerous third-party applications.
User-Friendly Interface: Makes managing user identities straightforward.

Microsoft Entra ID implementation varies across industries. Tech firms leverage it for secure, scalable access management, while healthcare organizations utilize its identity protection features to safeguard patient data. Educational institutions adopt Entra ID for streamlined user management and policy enforcement, ensuring secure access for students and staff across on-premises and cloud resources.

Microsoft

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.

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Cognito vs. Microsoft Entra ID

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon Cognito vs. Microsoft Entra ID

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