Identity providers

Cerbos authorization for Zitadel

Use Zitadel projects, granted organizations, and user metadata to power fine-grained authorization decisions in Cerbos policies.

Project-scoped roles

Reference Zitadel project roles and organization grants directly in Cerbos policies for per-project authorization

B2B organization grants

Write authorization rules that account for Zitadel's organization grant model, enabling cross-org access control

Cloud-native and self-hosted

Both Zitadel and Cerbos can run self-hosted or in the cloud, giving you deployment flexibility without architecture changes

How Cerbos works with Zitadel

Zitadel handles authentication, confirming who a user is. Cerbos handles authorization, deciding what that user can do. Together they give you a complete access control stack without coupling identity logic to business rules.

Cerbos lets you write fine-grained, context-aware authorization policies in human-readable YAML. Policies are decoupled from application code so product and security teams can update permissions without a release cycle.

Because Cerbos runs as a stateless Policy Decision Point (PDP) next to your application, authorization checks are sub-millisecond and scale horizontally with your infrastructure.

Policy-as-codeHuman-readable YAML policies managed like source code Scalable PDPStateless policy decision point with sub-millisecond latency Centralized managementManage, test, and deploy policies from a single control plane

Authorization built on Zitadel's project and organization model

Zitadel structures identity around projects, organizations, and grants, a model designed for B2B and multi-tenant applications. Cerbos uses that structure to make fine-grained authorization decisions, going beyond what Zitadel's built-in role checks can express.

How it works

Users authenticate through Zitadel, your application receives OIDC tokens containing project roles, organization membership, granted organization data, and custom metadata.
Your application passes identity data to Cerbos as principal attributes, alongside the target resource and action.
Cerbos evaluates policies that reference Zitadel project roles, organization grants, user metadata, and resource properties.
Your application enforces the decision, authorization rules live in policies, not in application code.

Multi-tenant authorization with organization grants

Zitadel's organization grant model lets one organization grant another access to its projects with specific roles. Cerbos policies can use this grant context to enforce fine-grained access rules: different permissions for users from the owning organization versus granted organizations, resource-level restrictions based on organization membership, and conditional rules based on project-specific roles.

Get started

Check out the Cerbos documentation to learn how to pass Zitadel token claims to Cerbos for policy evaluation.

FAQ

Can Cerbos use Zitadel project roles and grants?

Yes. Zitadel's project roles and organization grants are included in OIDC token claims. Your application passes these to Cerbos as principal attributes, where policies can reference project-scoped roles and granted organization context for authorization decisions.

How does Cerbos handle Zitadel's multi-organization model?

Zitadel supports B2B scenarios where organizations grant access to other organizations' projects. The granting organization ID and project roles can be passed to Cerbos, enabling policies that enforce different access rules depending on which organization the user belongs to and which project they are accessing.

Can I use Zitadel user metadata in Cerbos policies?

Yes. Zitadel allows custom key-value metadata on users and organizations. When included in token claims via actions, this metadata can be passed to Cerbos as principal attributes and used in policy conditions.