Amazon Cognito vs Okta Workforce Identity comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Okta are both solutions in the Access Management category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.9, while Okta is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.6% mindshare in AM, compared to Okta’s 14.3% mindshare. Additionally, 75% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Okta users who would recommend it.

Amazon Cognito

Read 12 Amazon Cognito reviews

2,282 Views
1,908 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Okta Workforce Identity

Read 64 Okta Workforce Identity reviews

3,744 Views
2,975 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon Cognito

Okta Workforce Identity

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2024

Okta Workforce Identity and Amazon Cognito are both prominent identity and access management solutions. Based on user reviews, Amazon Cognito seems to have the edge in feature richness and cost-effectiveness, while Okta Workforce Identity receives higher marks for customer support and deployment.

Features: Okta Workforce Identity users appreciate its robust access management and integration capabilities with various apps. Amazon Cognito is praised for its detailed user pools and extensive security features. Overall, Amazon Cognito offers more advanced technical features, making it preferred by tech-savvy users.

Room for Improvement: Okta Workforce Identity users seek improvements in its reporting tools and admin console customization. Amazon Cognito users desire better documentation and easier integration processes. Both products have distinct areas needing enhancement, but Okta's user feedback highlights more administrative and usability challenges.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Okta Workforce Identity is noted for smooth deployment and exceptional customer support. Amazon Cognito’s deployment is described as moderately complex, and its customer service receives mixed reviews. Users find Okta more reliable in terms of setup and ongoing support.

Pricing and ROI: Users report Okta Workforce Identity as having higher initial setup costs but providing good ROI over time. Amazon Cognito offers a more economical starting price and is seen as cost-effective, yet some users question its long-term ROI. Budget-conscious users often lean towards Amazon Cognito for its lower entry cost, though Okta's ROI is steadily acknowledged.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Cognito vs. Okta Workforce Identity Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Cognito vs. Okta Workforce Identity

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

7th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Okta Workforce Identity

Ranking in Access Management

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Single Sign-On (SSO) (5th), Authentication Systems (6th), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (6th), Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) (IAMaaS) (2nd), ZTNA as a Service (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Access Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Cognito is 7.6%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Okta Workforce Identity is 14.3%, up from 11.3% 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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Tor Nordhagen

Executive Director at Semaphore

Extremely easy to work with, simple to set up, and reasonably priced

The drawback of this solution is that in our shops, many staff members sometimes have to be borrowed from one shop to another and the solution does not really support having multiple roles. The user experience we would like to have when a person works in shop A which pays their salary is that they should have access to pretty much everything. Maybe you have somebody who is a manager in that shop A, he should be able to order new wear, he should be able to change the pricing, he should be able to empty the cash registry, and ship it to the bank. But when for instance, in COVID, people had to fill in for people in shops where a lot of people were sick, then they had to actually use user accounts of people that work in shop B. If you were employed in shop A, you could not work in shop B without borrowing somebody else's user ID and password. Which is really bad. We haven't been able to work around that and Okta Workforce Identity does not have a solution for it. We are now piloting their identity governance solution. Obviously, it's easy to give somebody access, give them an account, and give them roles, but it's hard to maintain that. For example, if you moved from, say working in a shop to working in a warehouse. But why do you still have all this shop access? The solution has until now not had anything to really support the process of taking away access. But now we are in a better release program of Okta's identity governance solution. Although it's very basic, the solution has started on a journey, but identity governance is something that Okta Workforce Identity really needs to improve. The ability or the options in the solution for changing the look and feel are not good enough because in our partner portal, essentially what they have is an ugly admin interface. The admin interface is good enough for us technical people because that's all we need. We work with the product and we're able to see the data but when it comes to presenting the service portal, Okta Workforce Identity does not have any capabilities really for making it look pretty. To add branding and different graphical user interface elements than Okta basic for essentially delegated admin for the business-to-business portal is horrifying because you're essentially using the tech admin. The only option we had and used, was to take the tech admin console and strip it. so that a vendor that has some goods that are sold in the shops, when they want to add a user on their side, say a driver or a packer on their side who should know how much they've packed in a truck to come to our warehouse, then the user interface that this vendor is using, these functional people will then have to use an extremely basic user interface.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its swift authentication."

"Cognito speeds up our development and saves us time."

"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."

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

"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."

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

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

More Amazon Cognito pros

"It is a very stable solution."

"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."

"The provisioning functionality has been the most valuable. This solution has good performance, fast integration and is very responsive."

"It's reliable and it does what it is advertised to do."

"The product is easy to use."

"Okta Workforce Identity is easy to use and has a lot of components."

"The feature that is most valuable to me is the automated user provisioning that we set up using Okta as a major part of that process."

"First of all, the solution is very simple."

More Okta Workforce Identity pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

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

"The secure authentication of Amazon Cognito has benefited our company. We were previously using legacy signup systems."

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

"Amazon Cognito could improve by simplifying the configuration."

More Amazon Cognito cons

"The solution is very expensive."

"The product is expensive compared to other tools."

"We experienced some technical glitches that need to be resolved."

"Therefore, if you have 10 million users, that's almost 100 million, so it is costly."

"Its pricing needs improvement."

"You can't hide the device when you're checking logs."

"We still had to write several internal programs/scripts to complete the user-provisioning process. Okta does not have the ability to provision mailbox accounts for on-premise Exchange or in a hybrid O365 environment. The Group Push function from Okta to AD did not work reliably in our environment."

"The solution’s policies are difficult to understand due to the policy methods. They use authentication. The solution’s workflow is also difficult and not very active. They need to have proper documentation on it. In the next release, I would like to see the workflows being more digestible."

More Okta Workforce Identity cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."

"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 Amazon Cognito is low. The pricing model is based on the users."

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

"The product is relatively inexpensive compared to other tools."

"We pay $600 monthly per user for licences and there are no other additional costs."

"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."

"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 solution is not the cheapest but not the most expensive. They are in the middle rating."

"License is around US$20,000 annually."

"The price of Okta Workforce Identity is reasonable."

"The price of Okta Workforce Identity is competitively priced. We pay annually for the use of the solution."

"The solution’s pricing needs to be reasonable. You are dealing with a lot of components and the pricing is component-based."

"The licensing model is fine for general service usage. However, the charges for API features and API tokens can be quite high."

"This solution is costly. Pricing is decent if you have less users, but it significantly goes up the more users you have, with its cost not justified."

More Okta Workforce Identity pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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

What do you like most about Okta Workforce Identity?

Okta has introduced the Universal Directory. It has custom attribute capability and user permissions to read/write on their profiles or hide them. Profile sources and identity profile sourcing are ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Okta Workforce Identity?

The pricing is very high, which is an area for improvement.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Okta Workforce Identity?

We are facing one issue with Cypress test cases. Whenever I write Cypress test cases, we encounter problems with logging in through Okta. There is no proper documentation on integrating test cases ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 54% of the time

Auth0 vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 17% of the time

Cloudflare One vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 10% of the time

ForgeRock vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 6% of the time

Gluu Flex vs Amazon Cognito

Compared 2% of the time

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Microsoft Entra ID vs Okta Workforce Identity

Compared 37% of the time

Google Cloud Identity vs Okta Workforce Identity

Compared 10% of the time

SailPoint Identity Security Cloud vs Okta Workforce Identity

Compared 9% of the time

Saviynt vs Okta Workforce Identity

Compared 7% of the time

OneLogin by One Identity vs Okta Workforce Identity

Compared 2% of the time

More Okta Workforce Identity Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Cognito

January 2025

Download Amazon Cognito product report

Buyer's Guide

Okta Workforce Identity

January 2025

Download Okta Workforce Identity product report

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Okta

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.

Okta Workforce Identity is a comprehensive identity and access management (IAM) solution designed to enhance security and streamline user experiences for businesses of all sizes. As a cloud-based platform, it offers a suite of tools that simplify user authentication, authorization, and management across a variety of applications and services.

Core Features

Single Sign-On (SSO): Enables users to access multiple applications with a single set of credentials, enhancing convenience and reducing password fatigue.
Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Provides robust security by requiring additional verification factors, which can adapt based on the user's location, device, and behavior.
Lifecycle Management: Automates user account creation, updating, and deactivation, ensuring access rights are current and compliant with company policies.
Universal Directory: A centralized directory service that supports user and group management across various applications, simplifying administrative tasks.
API Access Management: Safeguards APIs by implementing policies that control how and when they can be accessed, which is crucial for protecting sensitive data.

PeerSpot users often praise Okta Workforce Identity for its ease of use and robust security features. IT professionals appreciate the streamlined integration with numerous applications and the flexibility in configuring access policies. Business executives value the enhanced security posture and the ability to enforce compliance across their digital assets.

For IT professionals, Okta Workforce Identity offers a scalable and efficient solution to manage user identities and access rights. The ability to automate routine tasks like user provisioning and deactivation significantly reduces administrative overhead, allowing IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. Furthermore, the platform's comprehensive reporting capabilities aid in monitoring and auditing access, which is critical for maintaining security and compliance.

Business executives will find that Okta Workforce Identity aligns with broader organizational goals of operational efficiency and risk management. Its intuitive user experience minimizes disruptions to workforce productivity, while advanced security features like adaptive MFA help mitigate the risk of data breaches. The platform's cloud-based nature ensures scalability and agility, enabling businesses to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and workforce dynamics.

Okta Workforce Identity stands out as a versatile and secure IAM solution, adept at meeting the complex needs of modern enterprises. Its combination of user-friendly features and robust security measures makes it a top choice for organizations aiming to streamline their identity management processes while bolstering their cybersecurity defenses.

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.

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Cognito vs. Okta Workforce Identity

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon Cognito vs. Okta Workforce Identity

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