I’ve been using Amplify for about seven months on a Next.js project. The CI/CD setup with GitHub has been genuinely painless: I push to main, and it builds and deploys automatically. The initial setup took me maybe 30 minutes.

Amplify Auth (backed by Cognito) was a big deal for me. I got social login plus email/password auth working without having to touch Cognito directly, which I was really dreading. Environment branching has also been a huge help—I keep a staging branch live all the time so I can test changes before anything reaches production.

On the Amplify free tier, build times for my project were around 3–4 minutes. After upgrading to paid compute, that dropped to under two minutes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The CLI and the Amplify Console can feel disconnected at times. I made changes in the console once, and my local amplify/backend configuration didn’t reflect them, which took a while to track down and debug. The error logs during failed builds are also pretty vague—most of the time they just point you to CloudWatch, and then you’re left tracing the issue yourself.

On top of that, the Gen 1 vs. Gen 2 split is confusing. The documentation seems to mix both, and it’s not always obvious which guidance applies to my setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.