AWS Cognito

“If your auth is behind a disappointing managed service like AWS Cognito”

“I think it's one of the worst AWS services I've used.”

“It basically works, day in and day out.”

“once you figure it out, it works just as well as the others”

“Given all the pain I've suffered working with both cognito and auth0”

“Cognito is a pain, but it mostly works once you get through their horrible docs.”

“they figured out that their cost projection was actually off by an order of magnitude”

“Cognito has real rough edges, this article doesn't really mention any of them.”

“Hate it for its unnecessary complexity, love it for providing auth at bargain bin prices.”

“using your own backend for authentication made it easier to manage things because your auth wasn't trapped inside Cognito”

“The number of compromises something like Cognito requires are just not worth the perceived gains.”

“after reading through the docs I wanted to pull my hair out”

“I really don't see any reason to be using Cognito in $currentyear.”

“I think Cognito is actually one of the few with absolutely no path to achieving this.”

“Cognito definitely leaves a lot to be desired, but overall I've never encountered any major issues with it.”

“whatever you pick on that first day setup you are stuck with FOREVER”

“we spent a two weeks working around the limitations to scrap it eventually”

“I share the OP's pain we chose to use cognito for the exact same reason and I've had the exact same pain”

“We mainly choose it because AWS was used anyway and the security aspect seemed to be solved entierly with this coice”

“the main point of their existence seems to be to trap you in AWS”

“Sure, AWS Cognito sucks. In many ways, the product feels stuck.”

“free ride is over if you want any improvements made to the service in the last 8 years”

“Don't like that email addresses are case sensitive, and now you want to change that? Sorry, you gotta create a new user pool from scratch--no way to migrate.”

“Don't even get me started on backups or other basic functionality one would expect from a service like this.”

“Cognito does have some rough edges.”

“Reading Cognito docs feels like someone took three separate manuals, threw them in a blender, and then sprinkled in some outdated Stack Overflow answers for flavor.”

“It’s not for users it’s for people who think 1/4 of the traffic a raspberry pi could handle is scale.”

“That puts you a few clicks aways from 5+ other identity providers and normal accounts.”

“I recall the webfinger redirect was frustrating to get right”

“This prevented us from failing over during last October's outage”

“This should have been available from the beginning. I don't understand why it took so long.”

“glad to see AWS investing in what started to feel like a service that was mostly abandoned”

“I am glad to see them investing in improving the lives of folks using this native AWS service.”

“Things such as AWS cognito, lambda elastic beanstalk, SQS can make it completely uneconomical to do multicloud.”

“I kind of like Cognito but both Cognito and especially API Gateway are somewhat convoluted to configure.”

“the rest 90% of AWS services like WorkMail, Cognito, API Gateway, are absolute hot garbage”

“The ultimate problem with Cognito though is the vendor lock in.”

“the tiered pricing changes for M2M in 2024 didn't make much sense to me”

“They made oauth client (cognito oauth credential grant) a subscription, raising our bill X10.”

“It is rigid, internally coherent, and entirely incompatible with anything beyond its own boundaries.”