Head to head
Amazon Cognito vs WorkOS (AuthKit)
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
45/100 | 51/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #9 | #4 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 79 | 69 |
| AI Authority | 0 | 37 |
| Web Authority | 35 | 35 |
| Expert Assessment | 67 | 61 |
| 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 | Enterprise SSO from $125/connection/month (third-party sourced; vendor pricing page not retrievable this session) · free tier: AuthKit/User Management free to 1,000,000 MAU, including email/password, social auth, Magic Auth, MFA, bot protection, identity linking, org modeling and domain verification; staging SSO and Directory Sync connections are unbilled |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (pay-as-you-go per monthly active user, plus per-token and per-RPS add-ons) | Freemium with per-connection subscription add-ons |
| 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. | B2B SaaS companies with an enterprise sales motion and ACVs comfortably above ~$1,500/year per SSO customer that need SAML, SCIM and audit logs shipped in weeks, especially where MAU volume is high but the paid connection count is modest. |
| 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 want to offer SSO on a low-priced self-serve tier, you are building a consumer/B2C app needing adaptive risk and fraud detection, you need granular RBAC or Auth0-style session management out of the box, or you require a deep current review corpus before taking on a core dependency. |
| Markets | SMB, Enterprise, Startups, Consumer/B2C applications, Public sector (with GovCloud limitations) | SMB, Startups, Mid-Market, Enterprise, B2B SaaS |
| Founded | — | — |
| Headquarters | — | San Francisco, USA |
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.