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Azure AD and AWS Cognito side-by-side

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In the last few weeks, I was involved in multiple opportunities on Microsoft Azure and Amazon, where we had to analyse AWS Cognito, Azure AD and other solutions that are available on the market. I decided to consolidate in one post all features and differences that I identified for both of them that we should need to take into account.

Take into account that Azure AD is an identity and access management services well integrated with Microsoft stack. In comparison, AWS Cognito is just a user sign-up, sign-in and access control and nothing more.

The focus is not on the main features, is more on small things that can make a difference when you want to decide where we want to store and manage our users. 
This information might be useful in the future when we need to decide where we want to keep and manage our users.

 Feature
Azure AD (B2C, B2C)
AWS Cognito
Access token lifetime
Default 1h – the value is configurable
1h – cannot be modified
SAML token lifetime
Default 1h – the value is configurable
1h – cannot be modified
Refresh token expiration
Configurable
Configurable
Auth session management capability
Yes
No
Single sign-on
Yes
Yes
Single sign-on lifetime
Yes
Limited
Multi-factor auth
Yes
Yes
Custom claims on identity token
Yes
Yes
Custom claims on the access token
Yes, from using AD App
No
Federation support
Yes
Yes
Social identity providers
Yes
Yes
Pricing
Main costs are from no. of users and objects.
Main costs are from no. of active users (MCU). Additional costs appear for federation when you want to do user data sync. No. costs per transactions, but take into account that if you integrate Cognito with IAM roles or KMS, additional costs from this services will appears.
Self-service
Yes
Yes

In the next post, we compare Azure AD and AWS ManagedMicrosoft AD.

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