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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t 1 be Microsoft?

Amazon/AWS and Google are big in the identity space too, so I think it makes sense that there's only room one real "third party" option.

It might be better for these two to merge than for either (or both!) to be subsumed into those much larger firms. This is why FTC allowed Sirius and XM to merge: to keep them both out of the clutches of larger firms who would have seriously considered killing satellite radio altogether.

[EDIT:] Of course, this merger may just be a ploy to drive up the price of a future merger with one of the larger firms...

Cognito and Firebase are bush league by comparison. They can do the basics well enough if you have the right integration engineers. Okta and Auth0 are light years ahead.

The difference is that Okta/Auth0 is never going to be the only piece of a solution. With AWS it's more than just Cognito, you have to consider IAM and SSO as part of the equation as well. And if you're a pure AWS shop the AWSness of Cognito (or its direct support in API Gateway, etc.) might make you prefer it to Okta or Auth0 regardless of feature parity. For Google the key asset is really Gmail/GSuite/Workspace, which is the primary identity provider for many, many organizations (and the sole identity provider for most of those). However kludgy Google's built in SAML stuff is there is a huge value in only needing to deal with one entity.

Cognito is a nightmare and many things are broken. I lost 3 weeks in Feb. on a project trying to get it to work and just integrated Auth0 in 2 days.

They're not really doing the same thing but you're probably correct that most customers are just relying on AD. I can easily imagine MS beefing up their identity offering to be more on par with Okta.

We replaced Okta with Azure AD. AAD had better OIDC and SCIM support along with being _significantly_ less expensive -- plus we had to use it anyways due to M365/Azure, so Okta offered no value.

I assume that's for enterprise, not customers.

Correct, though we do use Azure B2C with 3rd parties, as well.

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