The 3 Best OpenFGA Alternatives in 2026

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

Cerbos separates authorization logic from code: rules live in YAML policy files, versioned and tested like code, and a stateless decision point answers "can this principal do this action on this resource?" over gRPC or HTTP. Because it holds no data of its own, you pass in the attributes, which keeps it simple to deploy as a sidecar, a service or embedded via WebAssembly. It has about 4,600 GitHub stars and SDKs for the main languages. Cerbos Hub adds a policy editor, CI builds, rollout to every decision point, audit logs and multi-tenant policies. The PDP is free forever under Apache-2.0 with no account. Hub has a free Proof of Concept tier for 100 monthly active principals, Development from $25 a month (100 principals included, three-month free trial) and Production from $933 a month with 5,000 included; extra principals start at $0.25 each and fall with volume. Enterprise is custom. Paying yearly saves 15%. As of October 2026.

• Free, stateless PDP that is easy to deploy
• Policies as code with built-in testing
• Published, usage-based Hub pricing

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