Discover Cerbos' features, benefits and use cases
Explore the extensive range of capabilities that Cerbos offers to simplify and secure your authorization needs. Whether you're looking to understand the basics or delve into advanced functionalities, this is your starting point. Explore, learn, and see how the Cerbos authorization solution can fit seamlessly into your tech stack.
Benefits
16Decoupled authorization
Separate your authorization logic from core application code for enhanced security and maintainability.
Scalability
Ensure your authorization processes scale seamlessly with your user base.
Private by design
Ensure complete control and peace of mind by keeping your data within your environment.
Security standards
Align with prevalent security standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR.
Advanced observability
Gain insights into your authorization processes and decisions.
Authorize anywhere
Empower your authorization with on-device and edge capabilities.
Human readable authorization
Implement and update authorization policies with low-code, human-readable configuration.
Testable authorization
Ensure the reliability of your authorization policies with built-in testing capabilities.
No cloud or vendor lock-In
Deploy on any platform, ensuring independence and adaptability.
Simplified policy testing and distribution
Validate, test, and roll out policy updates with a fully managed pipeline.
Centralized management
Unify your authorization strategy in one central hub.
Coordinated rollout and monitoring
Seamlessly coordinate, rollout, and monitor your policies with Cerbos Hub.
Zero Trust security
Adopt a security model that assumes breach and verifies every request.
Embed anywhere
Empower your authorization with on-device and edge capabilities.
Standardized authorization
Achieve interoperability, auditability and consistent policy enforcement in accordance with AuthZEN standards.
On-premise & air-gapped
Run Cerbos Hub inside your environment. Keep policies and audit data under your control.
Features
18RBAC (Role-based access control)
Manage user permissions based on predefined roles within your organization.
ABAC (Attribute-based access control)
Define access controls based on user attributes and environmental conditions.
Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC)
Ensure dynamic and flexible access control with policy-driven decisions.
Permissions-aware data filtering
Efficiently filter data at the source, ensuring only authorized data is fetched.
Stateless authorization
Ensure real-time access decisions without managing application states, while benefiting from unlimited scaling.
Audit logs
Maintain a comprehensive record of all authorization activities for accountability and compliance.
Cerbos Playground
Experiment, test, and understand Cerbos policies in a sandboxed environment.
REPL (Read-eval-print loop)
Quickly test and evaluate policy and conditions.
Flexible policy conditions powered by Google CEL
Experiment with writing CEL conditions, enjoy a seamless policy development experience.
Scoped policies
Define precise access controls tailored to specific scenarios.
Role policies
Author permissions from a role’s point of view, not just the resource, and enforce least privilege by default.
Derived roles
Dynamically derive roles based on contextual information.
GitOps & CI/CD
Implement a reliable CI/CD workflow with Cerbos' GitOps approach and take advantage of GitHub Actions support.
Ecosystem
Integrations and SDKs for popular languages.
Flexible deployment models
Deploy Cerbos in a way that aligns with your infrastructure needs.
Admin API
Simplify administration functions with the Cerbos Admin API.
WebAssembly (WASM) embedded Policy Decision Points
Take advantage of Cerbos Hub’s unique, flexible approach to authorization by leveraging WASM for embedded PDPs.
IDE plugins
Accelerate your development workflow and ensure that your policies are error-free with real-time syntax checking.
Use cases
13AI security
Policy-driven access control and full decision logging for AI agents and agentic workflows.
Dynamic authorization for MCP servers
Secure your MCP server tools from day one.
Access control for RAG
Apply permissions-aware data filtering to your RAG architecture.
AI gateway authorization
Control which LLMs, tools, and agents each identity can reach through your AI gateway.
Agentic commerce security
Authorize every AI agent transaction before money moves.
Legacy application authorization
Secure legacy apps with policy-based authorization, audit trails, and context-aware access control.
Application permissions
Implement context-aware authorization for granular access control.
Multi-tenant SaaS
Scale your SaaS offering with controlled, audited, and isolated environments.
Per-tenant custom policies
Define and manage tenant-specific policies dynamically for every tenant, customer, or organizational unit.
Dynamic policies
Create, update and deploy policies programmatically to save engineering hours and accelerate releases.
Authorization for non-human identities
Secure every AI agent, workload identity, service, and API client in your ecosystem.
Support enterprise organizations
Manage the intricate requirements of large enterprises with ease
Product packaging
Offer trials, feature bundles, and custom packages with Cerbos policies.
Can't find a feature you're looking for?
Join our Slack community or contact us directly. We're always evolving, and your feedback drives our innovation.
Trusted by hundreds of companies
What Cerbos users say
"We can make unlimited conditions, attributes, parameters to any granularity level without writing any code. It allows us to deliver truly personalized services quickly, securely & at scale."
Karen Kim
CEO @Human Managed
"Cerbos has a grammar in their YAMLs that we can trust. What we had before was the wild west. It was thousands of lines of code."
Rob Crowe
Principal Engineer @Utility Warehouse
"Deploying Cerbos has allowed our engineers to spend their time on what really matters for Salesroom's success. And I sleep better at night."
Chuck Hardy
Head of Engineering @Salesroom
"Cerbos enables us to go to market very quickly, compared to an in-house solution. It allows us to offer new products faster, because creating or editing policies is so easy."
Engin Attar
Head of Product and Growth, Co-Founder @Debite
"For every client we have, we're able to have 2x, 3x, the number of users for that client on Nook than we could without the roles and permissions that we have."
Henry Arnold
CTO & Co-Founder @Nook
"We got the foundation set. Now we can scale and include more complex policies. And we can grow in the right direction and with the right security."
Edgar Rivera
CEO @4gcapital
"We can make unlimited conditions, attributes, parameters to any granularity level without writing any code. It allows us to deliver truly personalized services quickly, securely & at scale."
Karen Kim
CEO @Human Managed
"Cerbos has a grammar in their YAMLs that we can trust. What we had before was the wild west. It was thousands of lines of code."
Rob Crowe
Principal Engineer @Utility Warehouse
"Deploying Cerbos has allowed our engineers to spend their time on what really matters for Salesroom's success. And I sleep better at night."
Chuck Hardy
Head of Engineering @Salesroom
"Cerbos enables us to go to market very quickly, compared to an in-house solution. It allows us to offer new products faster, because creating or editing policies is so easy."
Engin Attar
Head of Product and Growth, Co-Founder @Debite
"For every client we have, we're able to have 2x, 3x, the number of users for that client on Nook than we could without the roles and permissions that we have."
Henry Arnold
CTO & Co-Founder @Nook
"We got the foundation set. Now we can scale and include more complex policies. And we can grow in the right direction and with the right security."
Edgar Rivera
CEO @4gcapital