Amazon Cognito vs. CyberArk Workforce Identity

Well Suited

1. B2C mobile and web apps with a high number of users.
2. Cheaper and cost-effective.
3. If the other pieces of the infra are already using AWS services like Lambda, S3, Pinpoint, etc.

Not Suited For:

1. Advanced use-cases (Biometrics based authentication) Email, and other MFA channels.
2. For any use-cases needing SCIM.
3. Customized flows of SSO, and MFA will need a layer on Lambda and other AWS services.

Incentivized

Centrify Identity Service is well suited for nearly any organization, especially ones utilizing Active Directory for user management. It is especially well suited for organizations looking to reduce internal resource use, because it's easy to maintain and manage. Its features also allow you to free up resources previously dedicated to the provisioning and deprovisioning of Office 365/Salesforce users (as well as other applications).

Incentivized

• Strong integration with React.js and client-side applications
• Easy to bridge Cognito identities with the rest of the AWS ecosystem
• Easy to store user profile data directly in Cognito rather than having to build additional services/endpoints
• Easy integration with AWS Lambda to extend and add sophistication to the service

Incentivized

• Single Sign-on Integration is easy and complete configuration is UI driven with lots of help tips
• RESTFul APIs for Multi-factor Authentication is easy to use and implement. Also, Centrify supports all new Security features for Multi Factor Authentication and hence you can easily select and configure different challenges based on the policies and roles for the user.
• Lots of Built-in reports available for normal day to day auditing.

Incentivized

• SCIM implementation is not present.
• B2B SaaS use-cases are very hard to configure. More suitable or B2C use-cases.
• Needs more recipes, plugins, SDK's.
• 2FA with Email as an OTP channel is not supported.
• 2 FA using biometrics is not available; can be customised using lambda.

Incentivized

• Occasionally, I get logged out of Gmail, sometimes in the middle of an email. I'm not sure why it happens, but I think it has something to do with timing out. Which is strange because I'm on email all day. Not sure why.

Incentivized

Centrify is central to creating efficiency and safety for our clients and internally. To remove it would cause a massive disturbance in the lives of our employees and our clients.

Incentivized

All the features AWS Cognito offers gives the user the options they need without making it too complicated. Your customers will be happy. On the administration site usability is also great. After a small learning curve, you can setup Cognito for your usage

Incentivized

AWS Support overall is poor. Your main resources are trainings and the docs, and the docs can be very confusing. Using Cognito well involves having a developer learn it deeply and help support your team in understanding it. That said, Cognito's competitors also have dismal support and even worse documentation, so while this isn't a strength for Cognito it may still be the frontrunner here.

Incentivized

The support staff thus far has been very helpful. At times I feel they are driving the process forward without my intervention or constant reminder, which is nice to have in a company for a change. Most support seems to be a hassle but so far Centrify appears to treat your project as their own project.

Incentivized

They are ideal tools to create a secure and unique login experience for our applications. Thanks to its API authorization, Amazon Cognito ensures connections to applications that are secure.It is easy to use and provides easy access to files and applications that you need to complete your goal.

Incentivized

We started off using ADFS from Microsoft, which took most of a day to get fully functional and nearly a week to get fully optimized. The documentation was inconsistent with ADFS and there was no real support without opening a Microsoft Premier Support ticket. At the time, if you turned on Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Office 365, it turned it on for everything without any granularity. Our Information Security department said that MFA was a requirement for offsite access to our email systems, but users didn't need MFA when onsite. We looked at Okta, OneLogin, and Centrify at the same time. Centrify was the only one that responded quickly and offered a free POC with support included. We tried to deploy the Okta solution on our own, but ran into issues due to some of our non-standard AD configuration. We never received a return call from OneLogin. The Centrify POC took about 15 minutes to complete for basic functionality and a couple of hours to work out the issues related to our environment. We have been very happy with the Centrify solution and went live with our POC.

Incentivized

• Amazon Cognito has had a positive impact on our business by allowing us to develop services that require user sign-up and sign-in more rapidly. Not only do we not need to build or maintain these features, but Cognito's implementation is also better than what we would be justified in building ourselves.
• Amazon Cognito makes user management easy. This reduces the time we have to spend supporting users. Non-technical product managers can even use the AWS Console to manage users without requiring support from developers.
• Amazon Cognito is likely more secure than what would be built in-house; a portion of our attack surface is now managed by Amazon.

Incentivized

• CyberArk Workforce Identity provides secure access to on-premises and cloud applications. The platform is highly scalable and works well for companies of any size.
• I can classify and label data. Also keep track of activity in shared applications and data, to know exactly who accesses each of the files.

Incentivized