The 3 Best SpiceDB Alternatives in 2026

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

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