Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Smallstep SSH VS Amazon Cognito

Compare Smallstep SSH VS Amazon Cognito and see what are their differences

Smallstep SSH logo Smallstep SSH

Single Sign-on SSH

Amazon Cognito logo Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your web and mobile apps quickly and easily. It scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.
  • Smallstep SSH Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • Amazon Cognito Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-13

Smallstep SSH features and specs

  • Enhanced Security
    Smallstep SSH enables strong authentication practices by integrating with identity providers, reducing the chances of compromised passwords and ensuring secure connections.
  • Centralized Access Management
    The platform centralizes user access management, allowing admins to easily manage and revoke user access across multiple servers and services from a single point of control.
  • Ease of Integration
    Smallstep SSH integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure and identity providers like Okta and Google Workspace, simplifying the onboarding process for enterprises.
  • Improved Compliance
    With detailed logging and custom policies, Smallstep SSH helps organizations meet various compliance requirements by offering traceability and accountability for user actions.
  • Scalability
    Designed with scalability in mind, Smallstep SSH can efficiently handle growing organizational needs without sacrificing performance or security.

Possible disadvantages of Smallstep SSH

  • Complexity of Setup
    For organizations unfamiliar with identity provider integrations or certificate-based authentication, the initial setup can be complex and may require specialized knowledge.
  • Dependence on External Identity Providers
    Reliance on external identity providers for authentication means that downtime or disruptions with these services can impact Smallstep SSH functionality.
  • Limited Offline Access
    Because the solution is designed to work with identity providers, offline mode functionality is limited, which might be a concern for systems that require constant availability.
  • Cost Considerations
    For small organizations or startups, the cost of implementing and maintaining an enterprise-level authentication system like Smallstep SSH might be prohibitive.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a learning curve associated with transitioning from traditional SSH management to Smallstep SSH's certificate-based approach, which might necessitate training for IT staff.

Amazon Cognito features and specs

  • Scalability
    Amazon Cognito can automatically scale to handle millions of users, making it suitable for both small and large applications.
  • Security
    It is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and comes with built-in security features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and encryption.
  • Integrations
    Cognito seamlessly integrates with other AWS services and can be easily incorporated into your existing AWS infrastructure.
  • Federated Identities
    It supports federated identities, allowing users to sign in with different identity providers like Google, Facebook, and enterprise identity providers via SAML.
  • User Management
    Offers robust user management features such as user groups, roles, and fine-grained access permissions, which are essential for more complex applications.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Cognito

  • Complexity
    Setting up and configuring Cognito can be complex, especially for developers who are not familiar with AWS services or identity management.
  • Cost
    While the initial tier is free, costs can add up quickly for applications with a large user base and high interaction volume.
  • Limited Customization
    Although you can customize some aspects of the authentication flow, there are limitations which can be restrictive if you need highly tailored authentication processes.
  • Regional Availability
    Cognito may not be available in all AWS regions, which can be a limitation if your application needs to comply with data residency requirements or leverage a specific AWS region.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a learning curve associated with understanding how to effectively use and integrate Cognito within your application, which can take time and resources.

Smallstep SSH videos

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Amazon Cognito videos

Amazon Cognito Tutorial - Amazon Cognito User Pools & AWS Amplify Setup

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Smallstep SSH and Amazon Cognito)
Identity And Access Management
Identity Provider
0 0%
100% 100
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
SaaS
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Smallstep SSH and Amazon Cognito

Smallstep SSH Reviews

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Amazon Cognito Reviews

12 User Authentication Platforms [Auth0, Firebase Alternatives]
Cognito is Amazon’s cloud application authentication solution for the masses. It’s a low code deployment that can be used with conventional passwords or 3rd party logins like Google or Facebook.
Source: geekflare.com
Auth0 Vs cognito
Auth0 is far, far easier to implement. But… it is way more expensive. We started on Auth0 and then switched to Cognito. Cognito has cost us a lot of development time. On the other hand all of our data is collected in a single place, AWS, making it easier to analyze (Cloudwatch alerts).

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon Cognito seems to be a lot more popular than Smallstep SSH. While we know about 69 links to Amazon Cognito, we've tracked only 1 mention of Smallstep SSH. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Smallstep SSH mentions (1)

  • SSH With SSO
    Through a combination of the properties that are in an SSH certificate and configuration on the hosts, you'll be able to realize RBAC. If you're using the open source step-ca, this will require you to configure things yourself on the hosts. We also have an offering where this capability and management/auditing of the rules is hosted for you, which makes that specific part easier: https://smallstep.com/sso-ssh/. Source: almost 2 years ago

Amazon Cognito mentions (69)

  • Securing Your Spring Boot Fortress: Best Practices for Robust Applications
    AWS Cognito: Offers user management, authentication, and authorization services. Provides pre-built UI components for user registration and login. AWS Cognito Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Make Tekton Dashboard user authenticated at EKS using AWS Cognito
    -- There will be a oauth2-proxy service deployed -- This service will be exposed via the loadbalancer and the loadbalancer will be mapped against the your domain eg tekton-dashboard.myeks.com -- The upstream of the oauth-proxy service is the tekton-dashboard service. -- We will use AWS Cognito as the OIDC provider for oauth2-proxy service ie user will be authenticated via AWS Cognito. -- With the above setup,... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Serverless Security - Cognito Misconfigurations
    Below I look into two possible misconfigurations for the Amazon Cognito service. This is a service from AWS that let's you add sign-up and authentication capabilities to your application quickly and easily. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • AWS Cognito - IAM in the Cloud
    AWS Cognito is a service that simplifies identity management for apps built in the AWS ecosystem. It facilitates the authentication of users and the authorization of those users to access resources in your application. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Friday Thoughts on email validation
    The authentication system is web based and thus uses HTML1. There is a backend written in JavaScript (actually TypeScript), which in turn - for some operations - talks to a service written in .NET that stores data in AWS Cognito. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Smallstep SSH and Amazon Cognito, you can also consider the following products

Keystash.io - Centralized Linux user and SSH key management software

Auth0 - Auth0 is a program for people to get authentication and authorization services for their own business use.

strongDM - Trust strongDM to manage an engineers access to everything

Okta - Enterprise-grade identity management for all your apps, users & devices

OneLogin - On-demand SSO, directory integration, user provisioning and more

BastionXP - BastionXP Identity Based Infrastructure Access Platform is a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) / Certificate Authority (CA) that creates, signs and distributes SSH, SSL X.509 certificates to servers and users upon successful SSO login via OAuth or SAML