The 3 Best Cerbos Alternatives in 2026

Permit.io lets developers define permissions as code or in a web UI that product and support teams can use too, then enforces them through a policy decision point (PDP) that runs next to your app, so checks stay fast and keep working if Permit's cloud is unreachable. It supports role-based, attribute-based and relationship-based models, multi-tenancy, approval flows and embeddable user-management components, and it keeps policy in sync using OPAL, its Apache-2.0 open-source project. It has added permission controls for AI agents and MCP tools. The Community plan is free forever for up to 1,000 monthly active users, 20 tenants, 25 roles and 3 environments. Pro and Enterprise are priced on request; Enterprise removes the limits and adds SOC 2, HIPAA BAA, on-prem deployment and an uptime SLA. Startups and open-source projects can ask for discounts. As of October 2026.

• RBAC, ABAC and ReBAC in one product
• UI that non-engineers can use to manage permissions
• Local decision point keeps checks fast

OpenFGA models permissions as relationships ("user X is an editor of folder Y, and editors of a folder can view its documents") and answers check, list and expand queries quickly at scale. It was created by the Auth0 team at Okta, has powered Auth0 FGA in production since 2021, and became a CNCF incubating project in 2025. It has about 6,000 GitHub stars, SDKs for the main languages, a modelling language with a playground, and Postgres, MySQL or SQLite storage. The engine is free under Apache-2.0; what you pay for is running it: a small service plus a database, and the time to design your authorization model. Auth0 FGA is the hosted, commercial version for teams that do not want to operate it, priced through Auth0 sales. As of October 2026.

• Free and vendor-neutral under the CNCF
• Zanzibar-style model scales to sharing and nested resources
• Managed path through Auth0 FGA

SpiceDB stores relationships between users and resources and answers permission checks with consistency guarantees modelled on Google's Zanzibar paper, including protection against the "new enemy" problem when access is revoked. It has about 7,200 GitHub stars, a schema language with a playground, and runs on Postgres, CockroachDB, Spanner or MySQL. It is the most complete open-source Zanzibar implementation, which suits products with sharing, nested groups and large permission graphs. The engine is free under Apache-2.0. AuthZed sells managed versions: AuthZed Cloud is resource-based and usage-billed (from about $2 an hour for a permissions system), Dedicated Cloud is priced on reserved vCPU capacity, and Self-Hosted is an annual licence per region and per vCPU with support. As of October 2026.

• Most complete open-source Zanzibar implementation
• Strong consistency guarantees on revocation
• Several production-grade datastores