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What's the Difference Between Amazon Cognito and AWS IAM?

Compare Amazon Cognito and AWS IAM side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

Compare side-by-side

Comparisons
Amazon Cognito
AWS IAM
Category

Security, Customer identity (CIAM)

Security, Identity & access

Description

Offers secure, scalable, and customized sign-up and sign-in in minutes

Management of identities and access to AWS services and resources

Best for
  • User authentication
  • Social sign-in
  • MFA
  • User management
  • API authorization
  • Access control
  • Identity federation
  • Least privilege
  • Cross-account access
  • Service control
Key features
  • User pools
  • Identity pools
  • Social & SAML federation
  • Adaptive authentication
  • Hosted UI
  • Policies
  • Roles
  • MFA
  • Identity Center
  • Access Analyzer
Pricing model

Pay per MAU (monthly active user)

No additional charge

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“User pools handle sign-up, sign-in, and token management. Identity pools exchange those tokens for temporary AWS credentials. Most apps need both: User pool for authentication, Identity pool for S3 or DynamoDB access from the client. The hosted UI gets you a login page in minutes.”
— Giovanni Lauria, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“Start with zero permissions and add only what is needed. Use IAM Access Analyzer to identify unused permissions, and service control policies in Organizations to set guardrails that no individual account can override. Avoid long-lived access keys; prefer IAM roles with temporary credentials.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use Amazon Cognito or AWS IAM

Use Amazon Cognito when:

  • User authentication
  • Social sign-in
  • MFA
  • User management
  • API authorization

Learn more about Amazon Cognito »

Use AWS IAM when:

  • Access control
  • Identity federation
  • Least privilege
  • Cross-account access
  • Service control

Learn more about AWS IAM »

AWS product comparisons

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