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Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

My experience with Cognito matches the author's experience exactly. I mostly used Auth0 in the past, but we switched to Cognito for a new project because it would be cheaper.

Don't like that email addresses are case sensitive, and now you want to change that? Sorry, you gotta create a new user pool from scratch--no way to migrate.

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That’s really the worst feature of it. When you first set it up you’re asked at least a dozen questions that you probably have no idea what they mean. But you have to pick something. And whatever you pick on that first day setup you are stuck with FOREVER. Unless you do a complex data migration task.

Also, want to migrate to a different provider? Sorry. You can’t get the hashed passwords out. So if you do a migration it will be painful to users since they’ll have to do a password reset.

Yes it’s cheap. But you get what you pay for.

Ory Kratos has a password migration hook that lets you migrate password credentials out of anything (including Cognito) without password resets. I believe most other (modern) auth vendors have an equivalent.

I really don't see any reason to be using Cognito in $currentyear.

Disclosure: working for Ory.

Auth0 will run an export for you, but you have to file a support ticket for them to do it, and it may take them a bit of time, so you may end up with some users who get reset to a slightly old password (if they change it between the export and your import) or if you get a new registration.

Given all the pain I've suffered working with both cognito and auth0, I can't imagine a reason for using either in $currentyear.

Yea I went through this as well - when I tested it, they also required you be on a paid plan to even be able to get the export, which is kinda crazy. I work at an auth company now (Clerk) and this experience drove our current approach, which is that you can instantly export all your user data through a button in the dashboard. Maybe it's not as "sticky", but I think respecting your users when they want to get their data or migrate off is way more important.

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