Head to head
Amazon Cognito vs Neon
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
44/100 | 54/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #8 | #6 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 79 | 78 |
| AI Authority | 0 | 42 |
| Web Authority | 35 | 25 |
| Expert Assessment | 60 | 64 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | Lite: $0.0055 per MAU above the free tier (first band), $0.0046 per MAU next band — AWS example 950,000 MAUs = $4,405/month · free tier: 10,000 MAU/month per account or AWS Organization on Lite and Essentials (does not expire); 50 MAU/month for SAML 2.0/OIDC federated users on any tier; identity pools free of charge; no free tier on Plus, none for M2M token requests, and none in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions | Launch: no monthly minimum — compute $0.106/CU-hour, storage $0.35/GB-month · free tier: Free plan is permanent, no credit card: 100 projects, 10 branches/project, 100 CU-hours/project, autoscaling to 2 CU (8 GB RAM), scale to zero after 5 min, 0.5 GB storage/project, 6-hour history window, 1 manual snapshot, 5 GB egress, up to 60k Auth MAU, community support; hitting any monthly limit suspends compute until next billing month |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (pay-as-you-go per monthly active user, plus per-token and per-RPS add-ons) | Usage-based (pay-as-you-go, metered hourly) with a permanent free tier |
| Best for | Engineering teams already running on AWS that are building consumer or B2C applications with social/direct sign-in, either below 10,000 MAU (free) or above roughly 500,000 MAU on Lite, and with in-house capacity to wire up Lambda triggers, IAM, KMS and SNS/SES. | Teams running many short-lived, mostly-idle Postgres databases — preview environments, per-PR branches, per-customer sandboxes — and startups or AI/agent builders with spiky load who want Postgres plus pgvector with no seat costs and no monthly minimum. |
| Avoid if | You sell B2B SaaS where every user arrives via a corporate SAML/OIDC IdP, need adaptive authentication on a small user base, provision an app client per tenant beyond 2,500, operate in GovCloud, have no AWS footprint or platform engineering capacity, or require a fixed predictable monthly invoice. | You run latency-critical low-traffic production apps (cold starts), steady-state high-utilisation workloads where there is no idle to reclaim at $0.222/CU-hour, need compliance or an SLA below the Scale tier, need more than 56 CU / 224 GB RAM, or must commit to a hard fixed monthly budget. |
| Markets | SMB, Enterprise, Startups, Consumer/B2C applications, Public sector (with GovCloud limitations) | Startups, SMB, Developers, Agencies, Enterprise (Scale plan), AI/agent platforms |
| Founded | — | 2021 |
| Headquarters | — | Menlo Park, California, United States |
A higher TOP SCORE means more of the evidence favours that platform on this methodology — it is not a recommendation, and it does not account for your specific requirements. Advertisers are never declared the winner of a comparison.