Head to head
Amazon Cognito vs Okta Customer Identity Cloud
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
45/100 | 55/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #9 | #2 |
| Confidence | High confidence | Medium confidence |
| External Reputation | 79 | 78 |
| AI Authority | 0 | 49 |
| Web Authority | 35 | 23 |
| Expert Assessment | 67 | 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 | B2C Essentials from $35/month (500 MAU); B2B Essentials from $150/month (500 MAU) · free tier: $0/mo, no credit card, up to 25,000 monthly active users, 1 custom domain, passwordless, unlimited social connections, 5 Organizations, basic attack protection, community support, 1 Enterprise Connection, self-service SSO and SCIM; separately a 30-day free trial on Okta Customer Identity |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (pay-as-you-go per monthly active user, plus per-token and per-RPS add-ons) | Subscription (MAU-based tiers) plus sales-led custom |
| 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. | Product and engineering teams under ~25,000 MAU who want to ship customer login fast on the free tier, and B2B SaaS vendors needing multi-tenant Organizations, enterprise SSO and SCIM without building federation themselves. |
| 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 a high-volume, low-ARPU consumer app where MAU pricing plus next-tier-up billing decouples cost from revenue, you need multi-year budget certainty, you only need basic login/logout, or you want to self-host. |
| Markets | SMB, Enterprise, Startups, Consumer/B2C applications, Public sector (with GovCloud limitations) | Startups, SMB, B2B SaaS, Enterprise |
| Founded | — | — |
| Headquarters | — | — |
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.