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
|
|
|
|
Key features
|
|
|
|
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.” |
“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.” |
|
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
Next steps with AWS for Security
AWS product comparisons
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages