Non-EU vendorIdentityHeadquarters: US

Amazon Cognito: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Amazon Cognito is a managed service from Amazon Web Services for sign-up, sign-in and access control. It supports customer identities with social sign-in and SAML or OIDC federation, passwordless sign-in with passkeys or one-time codes, and short-lived machine-to-machine tokens through the OAuth 2.0 client-credentials flow. It is delivered as a fully managed AWS service and configured through the AWS console or SDKs by applications that need their own user directory.

Amazon Web Services belongs to Amazon.com, Inc., a listed company headquartered in Seattle, United States, with no majority owner, so US law applies to the provider, including the CLOUD Act. Customers choose the AWS Region in which their data is stored, and the AWS GDPR documentation describes that control and refers to a GDPR data processing addendum. US legal reach remains relevant even when a European Region is selected. Cognito is not open source and there is no self-hosted version. A European organisation should decide on the Region and check the data processing terms before use.

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Sovereignty score

27 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign

Jurisdiction SOV-210
Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
Data residency SOV-350
Hosting inside and outside Europe (US, EU)
Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-320
Key management with a non-European vendor
Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
Closed source: switching requires data migration
Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-615
Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 10, 2026

Headquarters	US (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decision	Only for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty model	Vendor-hosted (non-EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting	US, EUVerified by hand
Open-source	NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant	YesVendor-stated
Category	Identity
Type	Product
Website	aws.amazon.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Amazon Cognito

The European alternatives to Amazon Cognito come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

58 European Identity vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Amazon Cognito hosts data in US, EU. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

Amazon Cognito is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Amazon Cognito together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Amazon Cognito?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Amazon Cognito include Adnovum, Airlock and Auðkenni. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Amazon Cognito?

Our list of EU alternatives to Amazon Cognito is mostly commercial options. Browse the category on the map for open-source choices.

Is Amazon Cognito GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Amazon Cognito is headquartered in US and hosts data in US, EU. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 10, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Identity

Identity: Identity and access management — SSO, MFA, directory services. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

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