Architecture Philosophy
Amazon Cognito is powerful. It’s also infrastructure. You assemble user pools, identity pools, app clients, domain configs, triggers, IAM permissions, and often custom Lambda logic. It’s flexible because it assumes you will design the system.
Simple Login takes the opposite stance. You don’t design auth. You plug it in.
Cognito works well when you already operate deeply inside AWS and have DevOps bandwidth. For most startups, that flexibility translates into surface area for mistakes - especially around token handling, session invalidation, refresh flows, and cross-tenant isolation.
With Simple Login, sessions, cookies, OAuth flows, and edge cases are handled for you. You integrate once and move on.
Multi-Tenancy Without Custom Engineering
If you’re building SaaS, multi-tenancy isn’t optional. With Cognito, you typically:
- Create separate user pools per tenant, or
- Store tenant IDs in claims and enforce isolation manually, or
- Build custom role and group logic
All of those approaches require discipline and ongoing maintenance.
Simple Login treats multi-tenancy as a first-class concept. Tenant isolation, session scoping, and access boundaries are consistent from the start. You don’t invent patterns. You inherit them.
That matters once you scale beyond a few customers.
OAuth and Social Login
Cognito supports OAuth providers, but setup is manual:
- Register provider
- Configure callback URLs
- Map attributes
- Handle edge-case claim mismatches
Miss one step and production breaks.
Simple Login ships with OAuth providers pre-configured. You enable, test, and deploy. The goal is not flexibility. The goal is speed with safety.
For indie teams and agencies, this difference is weeks saved across projects.
Sessions and Security
Cognito gives you tokens. What you do with them is up to you.
That means deciding:
- Cookie vs localStorage
- Refresh token rotation
- Session invalidation
- CSRF mitigation
- Token leakage prevention
Most AI-generated auth implementations get these wrong.
Simple Login handles sessions correctly by default. Cookies, expiration, refresh, rotation - already solved. You’re not debugging auth bugs at 2am.
Payments and Account Logic
Cognito does not understand SaaS billing.
You connect Stripe separately. Then you connect that to user IDs. Then you maintain consistency across environments.
Simple Login aligns auth and payments from the start. Users, roles, and billing states are synchronized. That reduces the risk of:
- Paying users losing access
- Canceled users retaining privileges
- Role mismatches after plan upgrades
You don’t duct-tape billing onto identity.
Operational Overhead
Cognito lives inside AWS. That means:
- IAM policies
- Region configuration
- CloudWatch debugging
- Lambda triggers
- Versioned infrastructure
If your team already operates AWS-heavy workloads, that may be acceptable.
If you’re building your first SaaS, it’s friction.
Simple Login removes that operational layer. No IAM tuning. No policy debugging. No region mismatches. You integrate through a clean interface and move forward.
Why switch from Cognito?
Cognito becomes painful when:
- You’re spending more time on auth configuration than product features
- Multi-tenant isolation feels fragile
- OAuth debugging keeps reappearing
- Billing logic is drifting from user state
Switching reduces surface area. Fewer moving parts. Fewer failure points.
You stop treating auth as infrastructure and start treating it as a solved dependency.
→ Replace Cognito with Simple Login
Is migration difficult?
In most cases, no.
You migrate users, map identifiers, and move session handling to Simple Login. Since Simple Login centralizes sessions and tenant logic, you often delete more code than you add.
Teams usually simplify:
- Custom Lambda triggers
- Manual token validation logic
- Role-claim mapping code
- Billing-to-user synchronization scripts
Migration is not about adding complexity. It’s about removing AWS-specific auth plumbing.
If you’re early-stage, switching now is cheaper than maintaining a Cognito architecture long term.