Compare Cerbos
How Cerbos compares with other authorization solutions
Compare Cerbos with the authorization products on your shortlist, from enterprise suites to policy engines. Thinking of moving off the authorization product you use today? Thereâs a guide to switching to Cerbos too.
What each team looks for in an authorization platform
Security, identity, engineering and product teams each weigh a different part of choosing authorization. Whatever you pick holds the rules for every application, gateway and AI agent you run for years.
Security leaders
Prove what every identity was allowed to do. Ask each vendor how quickly you can show an auditor the policy that was in effect at the time of any decision, and how long that record is kept.
Identity teams
Apply one policy model across every lane you own, from workforce identity to AI agents. Ask whether the rules from your IdP reach every app, gateway and agent the same way.
Product leaders
Take permission changes out of the sprint. Ask how a new role, a tenant's custom permissions or a new AI agent reaches production, and how many engineering hours each one costs.
Developers
Replace scattered permission checks with one call. Ask what each decision point has to hold, how policy is tested before it ships, and what your code does if a vendor service is unreachable.
Single authorization management platform
Authorize every identity. Govern every action. Prove every decision.
Enforce fine-grained, contextual and continuous authorization across applications, gateways, workloads and AI agents, with one platform deployed where you need it.
Decisions next to every workload
Run decision points as a service, a sidecar or a serverless function inside your own infrastructure. They hold policy and nothing else, and keep serving the last policy they received if the control plane is unreachable.
Policy your reviewers approve
Write policy as short, readable YAML, review it in pull requests and test it before it ships. Cerbos Hub builds, distributes and versions every policy, collects every decision into one audit trail, and runs hosted or on-premise.
Context and coverage beyond the app
Fetch identity, relationship and resource data at decision time from the systems that own it. Cerbos Synapse also connects Envoy and Istio, Trino and Kafka, MCP servers and AI coding agents to the same policies.
Covered in Gartner's AuthZEN research and KuppingerCole's Leadership Compass reports on policy-based access management, API security and generative AI defense. Winner of the 2025 API Award for best in microservices infrastructure, named startup of the year in access control by HackerNoon, and listed in the Startups 100 2025 index.
See how Cerbos compares
Authorization products differ in where policy lives, where decisions run, what evidence each decision leaves and what it costs at scale, among other things. The comparisons below show those differences product by product.
PlainID
Compare policy built in a vendor console with policy your teams review and test like code, at thousands of rules, and a control plane you can host yourself.
Axiomatics
Compare a XACML and ALFA estate that takes specialist skills to extend with readable policy any engineer or reviewer can work in. Axiomatics is now part of Leonardo.
PingAuthorize
Keep Ping for identity, and compare authorization tied to the identity vendor with one policy set across applications, gateways and agents, whatever IdP sits in front of it.
EmpowerID
Compare a converged identity platform that puts its own runtime in the request path with authorization that fits the identity program you already run. EmpowerID is now part of Omada.
PlainID
Compare policy built in a vendor console with policy your teams review and test like code, at thousands of rules, and a control plane you can host yourself.
Axiomatics
Compare a XACML and ALFA estate that takes specialist skills to extend with readable policy any engineer or reviewer can work in. Axiomatics is now part of Leonardo.
PingAuthorize
Keep Ping for identity, and compare authorization tied to the identity vendor with one policy set across applications, gateways and agents, whatever IdP sits in front of it.
EmpowerID
Compare a converged identity platform that puts its own runtime in the request path with authorization that fits the identity program you already run. EmpowerID is now part of Omada.
Market snapshot
Authorization software comparison at a glance
See what each product is, how it makes decisions, where those decisions run
and where its policy is managed, side by side.
| Product | Primary category | Decision model | Where decisions run | Where policy is managed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cerbos | Authorization management platform | Policy with roles, attributes, derived roles and request context | Decision points in your infrastructure, as a service, sidecar, DaemonSet, serverless function or in the browser | Cerbos Hub, hosted or on-premise, with Cerbos Synapse for decision-time context |
| PlainID | Enterprise authorization platform | Policy and attributes | Managed or self-managed decision points | PlainID's administration console |
| Axiomatics | Enterprise XACML suite | XACML and ALFA attribute-based policy | Self-managed services and sidecars | Commercial management suite |
| PingAuthorize | Commercial attribute-based platform | Policy and attributes | Self-managed authorization servers | Visual policy administration |
| EmpowerID | Converged identity platform with agent runtime | Hybrid RBAC, ABAC and PBAC over a JSON policy format | Platform decision point and an in-path agent gateway | Platform-centric governance |
| Permit.io | Authorization service for application teams | RBAC, ABAC and ReBAC, with relationship data synced to decision points | Permit's cloud or containers you run, with ABAC on the container only | Permit's cloud control plane, or on-premise on Enterprise |
| Oso | Managed authorization service | Polar logic over facts stored in Oso Cloud | Oso Cloud, with an optional fallback node in your network | Oso Cloud |
| OPA | General purpose policy engine | Rego | Self-hosted service or sidecar | Open source control plane options |
| Amazon Verified Permissions | Managed AWS authorization service | Cedar policies | AWS | AWS console and API |
| OpenFGA | ReBAC engine | Relationship graph with conditions | Self-hosted or managed | Model and tuple APIs |
| Google Zanzibar | ReBAC architecture | Relationship graph | Google internal, implementation specific elsewhere | Implementation specific |
Questions to ask every authorization vendor
on your shortlist
Ask the same questions of every authorization solution, Cerbos included. Our framework for evaluating authorization providers goes deeper.
Where does the source of truth for policy live?A model in a vendor console, or policy your reviewers can read, approve and test?
What does each decision point have to hold?A synced copy of your users and relationships, or policy only, with data read from the systems that own it?
How far does one set of policies reach?Applications only, or also API gateways, data platforms, Kafka, Kubernetes and AI agents?
What evidence does every decision leave, and for how long?Can you show the policy that was in effect at the time, months later?
Where can the control plane run?Only in the vendor's cloud, or also in your own infrastructure, including air-gapped?
What does it cost at your real scale?Counting people, tenants, services and AI agents, plus everything you run alongside it.
Talk through your shortlist with us
Bring the products youâre comparing and your requirements. Weâll walk through how Cerbos fits your stack, and if youâre planning a move, model a few of your policies in Cerbos with you.
FAQ
Standards disclosure
Alex Olivier, Cerbos cofounder and CPO, is one of the current OpenID Foundation AuthZEN Working Group co-chairs. Cerbos PDP implements the AuthZEN Authorization API. Comparisons on these pages are written by the Cerbos team, and each one is dated and checked against the other vendor's own documentation.