Multi-tenant SaaS teams
Use Cerbos when tenants, roles, and resource-level rules change often and need clear policy ownership.
Skip if:
Your app only has one or two static roles and no compliance pressure.
Open source alternative to PlainID, Axiomatics and Permit.io
Last verified
Cerbos is an open-source authorization service that externalizes access control policies from application code into versioned, testable YAML rules. Apache 2.0 licensed, deployable as a sidecar or standalone service.
Use Cerbos when tenants, roles, and resource-level rules change often and need clear policy ownership.
Your app only has one or two static roles and no compliance pressure.
Use Cerbos to provide a shared authorization layer across services without forcing every team to invent permission checks.
Each service has unrelated authorization rules and no shared policy governance.
Use Cerbos when access decisions need version history, tests, and explainable policy files.
A managed identity platform already covers your authorization needs with acceptable audit output.
Authorization logic gets dangerous when every service implements permissions differently. Route handlers, database filters, and business logic accumulate scattered checks that are hard to audit and harder to change. Enterprise customers then ask for new roles, attributes, or compliance evidence, and each policy change becomes an application release risk.
Cerbos runs as a PDP that receives principal, resource, and action data, then returns allow or deny decisions through APIs.
Access rules live in structured YAML policies that can be stored on disk, in Git, cloud object stores, or supported databases.
Cerbos supports role-based rules and attribute-based conditions, allowing teams to model simple roles and more granular contextual access checks.
Kubernetes service, sidecar, systemd service, and AWS Lambda deployment paths let teams place the PDP near the applications it protects.
Cerbos evaluates authorization policies outside application code and returns access decisions for principals, resources, and actions.
No. Cerbos handles authorization and can work with identity providers that supply user or service principal data.
Yes. Cerbos supports self-hosted PDP deployment through Kubernetes, sidecar, systemd, and serverless options.
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Run Cerbos on your own server
Hostinger sets Cerbos up as a one-click app on a VPS.
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