AWS Cognito Alternatives in 2026: 8 CIAM Platforms Compared

Most teams leaving Amazon Cognito are not leaving over the invoice. They are leaving because the hosted UI will not brand properly, Lambda triggers are hard to debug, the User Pool and Identity Pool split confuses every new engineer, and the pricing changed underneath them. If the pain is developer velocity, Auth0 or Clerk is the upgrade. If you need better experience at Cognito-like cost, Supabase Auth. To stay on AWS without a per-user fee, self-host FusionAuth or Keycloak. For passwordless consumer login, MojoAuth.

One correction before anything else, because almost every comparison on the web still gets it wrong: the 50,000 free monthly active user tier is gone for new Cognito user pools. AWS replaced it in November 2024. If your migration business case was built on the old number, rebuild it.

How we evaluated

Every price and plan limit below was read off the vendor's own pricing page or documentation in September 2026. Nothing here is copied from another listicle. Where a vendor does not publish a list price, this page says so instead of guessing.

Deepak Gupta founded LoginRadius and scaled it past a billion managed identities. Four axes decide real CIAM migrations. How does cost behave as active users grow? How much proprietary glue do you rewrite? Is enterprise SSO a feature or a paywall? And can credentials move without a password reset? That last point is where Cognito is genuinely difficult, and it is covered below.

Last verified: September 2026. Checked this pass: AWS Cognito tier pricing and the legacy free-tier conditions, vendor pricing pages for all eight alternatives, and current Keycloak release status.

What Cognito actually costs now

Cognito user pools are sold in three tiers as of September 2026.

Tier	Free allowance	Price above it	What it includes
Lite	10,000 MAU	$0.0055 per MAU for the next 90,000, then $0.0046	Basic authentication with social, SAML, and OIDC sign-in
Essentials (default for new pools)	10,000 MAU	$0.015 per MAU	Passwordless sign-in and passkeys
Plus	None	$0.020 per MAU	Adds threat protection

SAML and OIDC federation is billed separately across all tiers at $0.015 per MAU above a 50 MAU free allowance. User pools created before 22 November 2024 on the Lite tier can retain the legacy 50,000 MAU free tier under conditions AWS documents on that page. Identity pools remain free.

Quick comparison

Platform	Pricing (Sept 2026)	Best for	Main trade-off
MojoAuth	Free to 25,000 MAU; Business Pro from $50/mo	Passwordless and OTP-first consumer login	No SCIM provisioning
Auth0	Free to 25,000 MAU; B2C Essentials from $35/mo, Professional from $240/mo; B2B from $150/mo	Developer velocity and connector breadth	Far more expensive per user than Cognito
Supabase Auth	Free to 50,000 MAU; Pro $25/mo to 100,000 MAU; $0.00325 per extra MAU	Better experience at Cognito-like cost	B2C-leaning, no deep B2B organizations model
Firebase Authentication	Free to 50,000 MAU; Identity Platform SAML and OIDC free only to 50 MAU	Mobile-first consumer apps	No first-class enterprise SSO; couples you to GCP
FusionAuth	Community free and unlimited; Starter from $162/mo annual; Essentials and Enterprise from $2,970/mo	Self-hosting on your own AWS, no per-MAU fee	Licence is not OSI-approved
Keycloak	Free, Apache 2.0; infrastructure and staff only	Zero licence cost and full data control	You own upgrades, theming, and uptime
Okta	Workforce SSO from $6/user/mo; Customer Identity enterprise base $3,000/mo	Enterprise IAM with governance and lifecycle	Priced for enterprises, not for AWS-native startups
Microsoft Entra External ID	Usage-based per MAU; quoted	Organisations standardising on Microsoft	Trades AWS lock-in for Microsoft lock-in

Why teams leave Cognito

Developer experience. The hosted UI is constrained, flow customisation runs through Lambda triggers that add cold-start latency and awkward debugging, and extending a flow usually means building around Cognito rather than with it. That engineering time is the real cost, and it is not on the invoice.

The two-pool model. User Pools are a directory. Identity Pools hand out temporary AWS credentials. They are different products solving different problems, and the split is the single most common source of confusion in a Cognito architecture review.

Pricing changed. The November 2024 restructure moved new pools to Essentials at $0.015 per MAU with a 10,000 MAU free allowance. That is roughly three times the old Lite rate, on one fifth of the old free tier. Teams who budgeted on the 2023 numbers found out at renewal.

Lock-in. Cognito's value is the AWS integration, and that is also the anchor. Move any part of the stack off AWS and identity becomes the holdout.

Pain to pick

If your problem is	Look at
Developer experience is costing engineering hours	Auth0
You want better experience but must keep cost low	Supabase Auth, MojoAuth
You need passwordless and passkeys as the default	MojoAuth
Stay on AWS, delete the per-MAU line	FusionAuth, Keycloak
Hyperscaler-native but friendlier for consumer apps	Firebase Authentication
Enterprise governance, lifecycle, and compliance	Okta
The organisation is standardising on Microsoft	Entra External ID

1. MojoAuth: passwordless without the Lambda plumbing

MojoAuth is a passwordless-first CIAM: email, SMS and WhatsApp OTP, magic links, and passkeys via WebAuthn, with a hosted login page and SDKs that remove most of the front-end work. For a consumer product where login conversion is the metric, it replaces the part of Cognito that is hardest to customise.

Pricing (verified September 2026). The free tier covers 25,000 MAU permanently with email OTP, magic links, social login, and basic attack protection. Business Pro starts at $50 per month for 5,000 MAU and adds passkeys, phone OTP, custom domain branding, MFA, team management, and SSO. Enterprise private cloud is quoted, with dedicated infrastructure and a 99.99 percent uptime SLA. Startups and non-profits get 50 percent off annual billing.

Key features. Multi-channel OTP delivery for global reach, social and enterprise federation over OIDC, OAuth and SAML, bot and fake-signup protection, and no-code branding of the hosted flow.

Watch out. No SCIM provisioning, so it does not cover an enterprise directory-sync requirement on its own. Admin analytics are lighter than an enterprise IAM suite. Head to head: MojoAuth vs Auth0.

2. Auth0: the straight upgrade when velocity is the problem

Auth0 leads Cognito by a wide margin on developer experience, connector catalog, B2B Organizations, and modern auth orchestration. If your Cognito cost is measured in engineering hours rather than dollars, this is the obvious move.

Pricing (verified September 2026). The free tier covers 25,000 MAU. B2C Essentials starts at $35 per month and Professional at $240. B2B Essentials starts at $150 per month and Professional at $800. Enterprise is quoted.

Watch out. Per-user cost is an order of magnitude above Cognito, and the curve steepens past 100,000 MAU. The developer time you save has to pay for that. Before you commit, read Auth0 Isn't Overpriced, You're the Wrong Buyer and the full Auth0 alternatives comparison, because a chunk of teams migrate Cognito to Auth0 and then migrate off Auth0 eighteen months later. Head to head: Auth0 vs Cognito.

3. Supabase Auth: better experience, Cognito-class cost

Supabase Auth pairs a modern developer experience with a Postgres foundation, row-level security, and an open source core you can self-host. It is the one option here that improves the experience without moving you into a different cost bracket.

Pricing (verified September 2026). The Free plan includes 50,000 MAU, Pro is $25 per month with 100,000 MAU included, Team is $599 per month with the same 100,000 MAU allowance, and overage on both is $0.00325 per MAU. Stored users are unlimited; the cap applies to monthly active authentication.

Watch out. B2C-leaning. If a customer is demanding SAML SSO and tenant isolation, this is not the answer. Head to head: Cognito vs Supabase Auth.

4. Firebase Authentication: the other hyperscaler option

Firebase Authentication is the GCP-native counterpart to Cognito with smoother consumer ergonomics, SDKs for Web, iOS, Android, Flutter, Unity and C++, and automatic session and token handling. It is a sideways move chosen for developer experience, not a capability upgrade: on enterprise axes Cognito actually leads it.

Pricing (verified September 2026). Standard authentication is free to 50,000 MAU on both Spark and Blaze. With the Identity Platform upgrade, SAML and OIDC authentication is free only to 50 MAU and then follows Google Cloud pricing. Phone authentication bills per SMS at region-dependent rates.

Watch out. Same B2B ceiling as before: no real Organizations model, no first-class enterprise SAML. You also swap AWS coupling for GCP coupling. Head to head: Cognito vs Firebase Auth.

5. FusionAuth: stay on AWS, delete the per-MAU line

FusionAuth is a single-binary, API-first CIAM you deploy on your own AWS infrastructure or run in FusionAuth Cloud. You keep the cloud you are already on and gain the flow control, per-tenant theming, and extension model Cognito does not give you.

Pricing (verified September 2026, and it has changed). Older comparisons quote "$37 per month cloud, $125 per month self-hosted". Those figures are obsolete. The current pricing page lists Community as free and unlimited with the core authentication features, Starter from $162 per month billed annually, and Essentials and Enterprise from $2,970 per month billed annually. Cloud and self-hosted share the same four tiers.

Key features. MFA including TOTP and WebAuthn, social login, per-tenant branding, multi-tenancy, full REST API coverage, and OIDC and OAuth 2.0 compliance.

Watch out. The licence is not OSI-approved. Procurement teams with an OSI requirement will block it, and Keycloak becomes the fallback. Self-hosting also moves the cost from an invoice to an on-call rota. Head to head: Cognito vs FusionAuth.

6. Keycloak: zero licence cost, real operational cost

Keycloak is the de facto open source identity server: Apache 2.0, OIDC, OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0, identity brokering, LDAP and Active Directory federation, SPI extension points, and a full admin console. No per-MAU charge at any scale.

Release status (verified September 2026). Keycloak 26.7.4 shipped on 16 September 2026. The project maintains no long-term-support line: only the newest release receives security fixes. Staying current is a standing commitment, not an optional maintenance window.

Real cost. A production high-availability deployment typically runs a few hundred dollars a month in infrastructure, plus roughly half to one engineer for upgrades, theming, and on-call. Against Cognito Essentials at $0.015 per MAU, the crossover sits well north of 100,000 MAU once you price the headcount honestly.

7. Okta: enterprise IAM, not a Cognito swap

Okta is the enterprise option: lifecycle management and provisioning, adaptive MFA, Universal Directory, API access management, an integration catalog in the thousands, and the compliance posture large buyers ask for.

Pricing (verified September 2026). Okta publishes Workforce SSO at $6 per user per month on the Starter suite and $17 on Essentials, both billed annually. Customer Identity carries a $3,000 per month enterprise base platform fee billed annually, with usage-based add-ons quoted against total annual MAU. Note that Okta owns Auth0, so evaluating both is one vendor relationship, not two.

Watch out. If you are an AWS-native startup choosing Cognito for the price, Okta is not the replacement. It is the replacement when governance and audit requirements arrive.

8. Microsoft Entra External ID: only if the organisation is moving to Microsoft

Entra External ID brings external identity into the Microsoft cloud with Entra administration, Conditional Access, identity protection, and federation. On several enterprise axes it leads Cognito.

One hard constraint belongs in the evaluation: Azure AD B2C has not been sold to new customers since 1 May 2025. If a comparison recommends Azure AD B2C as a Cognito alternative, it is out of date. New work goes on Entra External ID. Head to head: Cognito vs Entra External ID.

Migrating off Cognito without resetting every password

This is the part that surprises teams, so plan it first. Cognito authenticates with the Secure Remote Password protocol and does not export reusable password hashes. You cannot do the bulk hash import that a migration from Auth0 or Firebase allows.

The standard pattern is lazy, or just-in-time, migration. You stand up the new platform, and on each user's first login there you authenticate them against Cognito behind the scenes, then re-hash and store the credential on the new side. Active users move transparently. Dormant users stay behind until they return, or they get a reset link when you finally cut over.

Practical notes. Run both platforms in parallel through the transition and keep the Cognito pool read-accessible until the tail is drained. Export user attributes and group membership separately; those do export cleanly. Every Lambda trigger containing business logic has to be re-implemented on the target's extension model, and that inventory, not the SDK swap, sets the timeline. Most migrations of this shape land in four to eight weeks with the large majority of active users moved without a reset.

Step by step: the CIAM Compass Cognito migration guide and the password hash migration guide. For the failure modes, Auth Migration Hell.

How to choose

If the pain is developer velocity and the budget allows, Auth0 is the upgrade. If you need better experience while keeping the bill in Cognito's range, Supabase Auth or MojoAuth. If you want to stay on AWS and remove the per-user charge entirely, self-host FusionAuth or Keycloak and budget the engineer. If the trigger was a compliance or governance requirement rather than experience, you are shopping for enterprise IAM, and Okta or Entra External ID is the right shelf.

For the full scored matrix on one set of axes, see the CIAM Compass Cognito profile, the CIAM providers directory, and the top CIAM solutions ranking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best alternative to AWS Cognito?

It depends what you are optimising. For developer velocity and connector breadth, Auth0. For modern experience at low cost, Supabase Auth. For passwordless and passkey-first consumer login, MojoAuth. To stay on AWS with no per-user fee, self-host FusionAuth or Keycloak. For enterprise governance, Okta or Microsoft Entra External ID.

Does Cognito still have a 50,000 free MAU tier?

Not for new user pools. AWS restructured Cognito pricing in November 2024 into Lite, Essentials, and Plus. Lite and Essentials each include 10,000 free MAU; Plus has none. Essentials is the default for new pools at $0.015 per MAU. Pools created before 22 November 2024 on the Lite tier can keep the legacy 50,000 MAU free tier under conditions AWS documents on its pricing page. Any comparison still quoting a blanket 50,000 free MAU is describing the old model.

Can I migrate off AWS Cognito without forcing password resets?

Yes, but only with a lazy migration. Cognito uses SRP and cannot export reusable password hashes, so there is no bulk import path. You authenticate each user against Cognito on their first login to the new platform and re-hash the credential there. Auth0, FusionAuth, and Keycloak all support this pattern. Expect four to eight weeks and plan what happens to dormant accounts that never come back.

Which Cognito alternative has the best free tier?

Keycloak is free at any scale under Apache 2.0, and FusionAuth Community is free and unlimited for self-hosted deployments, so both are unbeatable if you can staff the operations. Among managed options, Supabase Auth includes 50,000 MAU free, MojoAuth 25,000 MAU, and Auth0 25,000 MAU. All three of those exceed what Cognito Essentials now gives you.

Is self-hosting Keycloak or FusionAuth actually cheaper than Cognito?

Only above a certain scale, and only if you count staff time honestly. Cognito Essentials at $0.015 per MAU costs about $1,500 per month at 100,000 users. A highly available self-hosted deployment costs a few hundred dollars a month in infrastructure plus roughly half to one engineer for upgrades, patching, and on-call. That engineer is the whole comparison. Below six-figure MAU, Cognito usually wins on total cost; above it, self-hosting pulls ahead.

Why do teams leave Cognito if it is the cheapest option?

Because the bill is not where the cost sits. A constrained hosted UI, Lambda-trigger debugging, limited flow customisation, and the User Pool versus Identity Pool split all consume engineering hours that never appear on an AWS invoice. Teams leave when that time exceeds the savings, which is why the alternatives above are ranked on closing the experience gap rather than on price alone.