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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) (12th)
 

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 2.8%, down 6.2% compared to last year.
WSO2 Identity Server, on the other hand, focuses on Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM), holds 2.7% mindshare, up 1.9% since last year.
Access Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Cognito2.8%
Microsoft Entra ID11.7%
Okta Platform11.2%
Other74.3%
Access Management
Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
WSO2 Identity Server2.7%
Okta Platform14.4%
Auth0 Platform12.1%
Other70.8%
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

"I would recommend Cognito for users who are already AWS customers."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Cognito are OTP validation and email validation."
"I appreciate Amazon Cognito's ability to scale with demand and its seamless user verification features."
"Cognito speeds up our development and saves us time."
"I rate Amazon Cognito nine out of ten."
"What is quite valuable is that we can outsource storage of the credentials to AWS, and they manage it quite securely."
"This is a scalable solution. If our app or general usage increases, this solution can support it."
"The federation is one of the most efficient features as the pricing is competitive."
"We use the solution for customer identity management, authenticating customers coming in through a web portal."
"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."
"Some of the valuable features of the solution are the easy integration with processes, such as Single Sign-On, and overall WSO2 is straightforward and does not need customization."
"Comprehensive ecosystem."
"The product's initial setup phase is easy."
"The feature that I found most valuable was the ecosystem, which is very comprehensive and allowed me to find the components that I wanted to use, including the identity server and the API."
"The Identity Server has been able to manage our complete user base with ease - including authorization and authentication."
"We are able to use this tool to better secure next generation data centers, which use software defined networks."
 

Cons

"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 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, but in Cognito, for each scope, there is a separate endpoint."
"The setup and configuration can be complex, especially for advanced use cases."
"I believe this product could improve by enriching user profiles."
"The MFA related to the solution's side is nonexistent."
"You need to evaluate the export users. The multifactor authentication, much less this room for improving the configuration setup of that."
"Amazon Cognito’s UI needs improvement while onboarding new users."
"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."
"This solution does not have BPM workflows already integrated, we had to integrate the BPM module externally. They do not provide full-featured auditing and certification modules out of the box."
"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."
"First, improvements have to been made in the high availability architecture. This has to do with the master-slave replication, and how the load balancing is handled between the identity servers."
"The price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution depends on the number of users using it."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing is bad so I rate it a two out of ten."
"They should bring in some good pricing models to host the marketplace."
"We have to take their support, but that is a minimal charge if I'm comparing it to other identity managers."
"WSO2 Identity Server is not an expensive solution."
"I have found the solutions license is priced competitively compared to others."
"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."
"At this time we are working with the open-source version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
11%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Construction Company
14%
Transportation Company
9%
Media Company
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 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 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: May 2026.
903,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.