Cognito vs Firebase Auth Comparison

Building an app requires a lot of effort, time and money. Therefore, you must design it in such a way that it improves the user experience.

You need quick and easy authentication and authorization for your mobile apps to optimize the user experience.

Users of your app should be able to sign in with a username and password or with a social media site such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Apple. 

Numerous solutions provide simple authorization and authentication for app onboarding and authentication.

We shall discuss the characteristics of two essential platforms in this article: Firebase and Cognito.

Cognito Overview 

If you are searching for an efficient solution for your app’s user management, authorization, and authentication, Cognito is the appropriate answer.

Cognito is an Amazon solution that provides robust and secure authentication and authorization features for mobile and web apps.

This powerful platform offers a variety of capabilities, including social login and connectivity to other Amazon Web services.

Cognito Features 

Cognito, as previously said, provides highly secure and effective authentication and authorization capability for your mobile app.

Cognito’s two significant features that allow it to deliver easy onboarding functionality are User Pools and Identity Pools. Let us look at each of these independently to see what these two Cognito features offer. 

• User Pools

The term user pool indicates that it is a directory of users in Cognito. This critical feature allows you to offer multiple services like logging in, signing up, integrating third-party services, and others.

Some of the other benefits this feature offers include the following: user and profile management, a sign-in web interface that can be customized, multifactor authentication, phone and email verification, takeover protection, compromised credentials, and others. 

• Identity Pools 

The identity pool differs from the user pool. Individual users have unique IDs in the user pool, but in the identity pool, the user can obtain temporary AWS logging information to access any Amazon services. 

• Built-in customizable UI sign-in users 

Cognito offers an integrated and customizable user interface via which users can sign up or sign in. The developer can use iOS, Android, and JavaScript SDKs to include user sign-up and sign-in to your app. 

• Robust security features 

Cognito’s comprehensive and sophisticated security measures safeguard access to your apps’ user accounts.

These enhanced security features provide risk-based intuitive authentication as well as protection against the usage of compromised accounts. 

• AWS resource access control 

Cognito allows you to restrict app access to various AWS resources. It enables you to establish and map user roles. Mapping the user’s roles restricts them to only the resources you have authorized for each user. 

• Standards-based authentication 

Cognito employs industry-standard identity management protocols such as open ID connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML 2.0.

• Adaptive authentication 

When the adaptive authentication technology identifies odd sign-in behavior, such as sign-in attempts from new locations or devices, it provides a risk rating to the action.

It allows you to prompt the user for extra verification or even block the sign-in demand. Users can use SMS or a Time-based One-time Password (TOTP) generator, like Google Authenticator, to authenticate their identities.

Cognito Pricing 

MAU (monthly active user) refers to a user who performs an identity activity such as signing, sign-up, password change, identity-related operation, and so on during a calendar month.

A free tier of 50,000 MAUs who sign in directly to the Cognito user pools is available. An additional 50 MAUs for users federated via SAML 2.0-based identity providers. 

The volume-based pricing plan, in addition to the already available number (50,000 free tier), is the following. For 50,001- 100,000, you have to pay $ 0.0055 per MAU.

The next 900,000 MAU charge at $ 0.0046 per MAU. For the next 9,000,000 MAUs, you have to pay $ 0.00325 per MAU. Other pricing models are available for the Cognito platform. If you want to learn more, go to their website.

Firebase Overview 

Firebase is a comprehensive app development, testing, authentication, and deployment platform. In this article, you’ll learn about Firebase’s authentication and profile management features. 

Firebase Features  

Here is a list of Firebase’s authentication and profile management features that ensure faster and more secure app onboarding in multiple ways.

• Authentication 

Firebase’s authentication feature assists developers in making their apps more secure. Authentication is a critical component of the backend process.

The authentication feature of Firebase has made confirmation of identity in several ways possible for app users.

The identity confirmation feature has significantly improved the user experience, contributing to brand loyalty. 

• Cloud Messaging

Firebase offers a cloud messaging service for cross-platform devices. As a user, it is critical because you can send messages securely to various devices independently.

Furthermore, because the messaging is cloud-based, you will not be charged. Messaging comes with all the important stuff like notifications and others. 

• Low code development 

Low code development is a fantastic feature offered by Firebase in which you do not have many code lines for simply adding one or two features to the application.

Firebase provides a low-code development methodology that allows developers, even with low skill, to add new features without much trouble.

Firebase Pricing 

Firebase has two pricing plans. One of the plans is a no-cost Spark plan, and the other is a Blaze plan, in which you have to pay for the amount of service you use. 

In the Spark plan, you get one GB of storage in cloud firestorm, 10 GB per month of network egress in cloud firestorm, and 20,000 writes per day.

Additionally, you get 10 GB of storage in hosting and 360 MB per day of data transfer. Furthermore, you can use the test lab of Firebase for 10 tests per day (virtual device tests) and 5 tests per day (physical device tests). 

However, you can subscribe to their Blaze plan if you need more features than those available in the Spark plan.

In this plan, you get all the features available in the Spark plan, and you have to pay per your usage for additional usage.

For example, if you want more than one GB of stored data in the cloud, you have to pay $ 0.108 per additional GB.

You must pay as per the Google Cloud pricing for any other network egress. For any further requirements above 10GB in the hosting storage, you must pay at a rate of .026/GB. 

FireStore also has other pricing plans; if you want to know about them, you should visit their website.

Firebase Auth vs Cognito Comparison

Conclusion 

If your requirement is purely for authentication and profile management of your mobile app, Cognito is perfect for your needs.

However, if you want more than just authentication and profile management for your app, you should choose Firebase for an end-to-end app development experience.

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