Identity management is a hot topic lately—stories about cyber breaches, industrial-scale data mining and the EU’s GDPR all connect back to a company’s identity system eventually. Too often those stories gloss over that fact that many of these data protection failures were avoidable if companies implemented more effective customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions. Two popular solutions, Amazon Cognito and FusionAuth approach the problem from different perspectives.
Cognito is part of the Amazon Web Services family and provides a registration and login tool that connects your user data to the wider Amazon data processing and advertising network. FusionAuth takes a different approach with a full-service platform that gives you control of your own users and data. This contrast in perspective explains many of the differences between Amazon Cognito and FusionAuth.
What Cognito and FusionAuth Have In Common
Hordes of Secure Users
At their most basic point of comparison, Cognito and FusionAuth both allow applications to register and login users to web and mobile applications, and they both take advantage of OAuth tokens & API key management providing secure access with proven and standardized protocols. Ready to handle identity and access for the next ‘killer app,’ they both are designed for web-scale applications and can register an unlimited number of users without a hiccup.
Fast Implementation
Cognito and FusionAuth are both designed to be quickly up and running with almost any platform. This is a tremendous benefit over developing your own secure authorization system which can take months or more of advanced developer effort. A ‘roll your own’ solution will also require constant evaluation and maintenance as technology and security threats evolve. Authorization with Cognito and FusionAuth are both designed to implement quickly on a variety of platforms allowing you to devote your valuable developer resources to application features that serve your customers and earn you revenue.
How Cognito and FusionAuth Are Different
Free for Unlimited Users
One of the biggest differences between Cognito and FusionAuth is cost. FusionAuth is free for unlimited users. No strings, gimmicks, or tricks. No cost increases when you hit a certain Monthly Active User threshold. Much like a database or a web server, secure authentication is so essential that developers should be able to implement it quickly and easily without cost concerns. And unlike the free options from other vendors, we don’t feature-cripple or user-limit FusionAuth. You get the full unrestricted platform with every feature and benefit.
Single-Tenant Security
A big difference between Cognito and FusionAuth is both of FusionAuth’s local and cloud options deliver true data isolation as single-tenant solutions. This eliminates the possibility of data leakage between unrelated companies, whether accidentally or through hacker activity. It also eliminates the risk of another company’s poor security practices allowing access to your customer’s data. FusionAuth also enables customers to implement a firewall at any layer, further protecting their data from unauthorized access.
FusionAuth’s single-tenant architecture also allows for easier compliance with complex regulatory restrictions in many industries and countries. Germany’s Bundesdatenschutzgesetz, Australia’s Privacy Principles, Canada’s PIPEDA, and most recently the European Union’s GDPR all place different restrictions on how a user’s personal data can be used and transmitted. FusionAuth provides the expanded control for companies required to comply with laws and regulations in their specific region.
For more details on the benefits and pitfalls of single- and multi-tenant solutions read this whitepaper.
Localization
A company doing business through the internet today has a storefront open to customers from around the globe. While having a vast pool of potential customers is a benefit, many companies struggle to deliver their products and services to the wide range of languages they encounter. FusionAuth was designed to allow you to easily communicate with your customers in the language they prefer. You can create customized HTML and text email templates for the languages you support, and quickly add additional options as your community grows.
Configurable Password Encryption
Every application has different security requirements. Some need to be HIPAA compliant, while others can be less stringent. We let you pick the level of security you need, and adjust it as quickly as your needs or threats evolve. We also allow you to use different password schemas for different groups of users, making it possible to consolidate multiple identity management systems into one efficient platform. This can be a completely transparent process without any downtime or customer friction.
For more details, read about how we migrated DataStax from their previous solution.
Reporting and Analytics
User reports have been in every slide presentation and corporate board meeting since the first bit of software hit the internet. From day one FusionAuth gives you the most requested reports like daily/monthly active users, logins and registrations without any additional configuration or setup.
Enterprise Identity Unification (EIU)
Another way Cognito and FusionAuth differ is how they can handle complex bulk merger challenges. In today’s fast-moving business world, companies merge with or acquire partners and competitors every day. It’s a difficult challenge to combine and manage the unique databases of users that each company brings into the system. This is the realm of EIU and presents many complex issues such as duplicate users, incomplete or conflicting data, and varying password schemas.
FusionAuth allows a parent company to create unique tenants to isolate distinct datasets while still providing a single user management system for the overall organization. It gives the administrators incremental control over how and when the information is merged, and can even engage the users to manage, filter, and unify their own profile data.
If you would like more information on how FusionAuth enables effective EIU across multiple identity management systems, contact us.
Custom Feature Development
Another difference between Cognito and FusionAuth is our size and flexibility. There is no doubt that Amazon is a huge corporation that reaches all corners of the planet. At their size, it is difficult to get custom features or functionality unless they can serve their all Cognito customers. Smaller companies with unique or non-standard needs will find it difficult to get any type of custom feature implemented.
FusionAuth is a small, bootstrapped company dedicated to our customers. We have successfully provided our core solutions with unique customizations and one-on-one support for our clients. We have eliminated the overhead, complex approval pipelines, and corporate red-tape that cripples large firms so we can deliver exceptional solutions for clients like DataStax, StrategyCorp, Deutsche Bank and IBM. If you have a specific challenge for managing users that we don’t already cover, we’ll work with you for a solution. This is an added benefit to having a single-tenant solution: your system can be customized to fit your specific requirements and specifications.
To see more details on how Cognito and FusionAuth stack up, download this feature comparison and please contact us if you have any questions.
You can also view technical documentation about how you can migrate from Cognito to FusionAuth.
Learn More About FusionAuth
FusionAuth is designed to be the most flexible and secure Customer Identity and Access Management solution available at the best price. We provide registration, login, SSO, MFA, data search, user management and more, 100% free for unlimited users. Find out more about FusionAuth and download it today.
Additional Comparisons
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