Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Permify

Cerbos is a language-agnostic authorization layer that externalizes permissions into context-aware policies evaluated by a stateless Policy Decision Point (PDP). It is designed to support least-privilege access control across applications, APIs, services, and modern workloads.

Key Features

• Policy-based authorization using simple YAML policies for resources, actions, and principals
• Context-aware decisions with conditional rules and attribute-based access control (ABAC)
• Derived roles and principal-specific policies for dynamic and exception-driven authorization
• Stateless PDP service exposing APIs for authorization checks and query planning
• Multiple policy storage backends (e.g., local disk, Git-based workflows, and supported databases)
• Designed for scalable, highly available deployments (service, sidecar, or other runtime patterns)

Use Cases

• Centralize authorization for microservices, APIs, and web applications with consistent rules
• Implement fine-grained RBAC/ABAC for multi-tenant or enterprise software
• Offload authorization logic from application code to a dedicated decision service

Cerbos helps teams manage authorization as code, enabling clearer permission logic, easier auditing of intent, and safer evolution of access rules as systems grow.