AuthZed (SpiceDB) vs Cerbos
Side-by-side comparison of identity tools. Sponsored placement is disclosed where applicable.
Quick answer
AuthZed (SpiceDB) vs Cerbos: which should you choose?
Short answer
AuthZed (SpiceDB) vs Cerbos have overlapping use cases in identity and access management. The right pick depends on your company size, deployment model, integrations, and pricing tolerance — compare those attributes side-by-side below.
- Best for
- AuthZed (SpiceDB): Product engineering teams building fine-grained, relationship-based permissions (sharing, hierarchies, multi-tenant B2B) at scale who want Zanzibar semantics without building them. · Cerbos: Engineering teams that need fine-grained authorization (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC, or ReBAC) in their applications and want to manage access-control policy separately from application code — particularly in microservices architectures, or where the same policies must consistently govern applications, API gateways, data platforms, and AI agents.
- When to choose
- Pick the option whose company-size fit, deployment model, and integrations most closely match your stack.
- When not to choose
- Skip a head-to-head if you haven't shortlisted a category yet — start with the IAM Stack Finder instead.
- Related tools & categories
- AuthZed (SpiceDB)CerbosIAM Stack FinderBuyer resources
| Attribute | ||
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Product engineering teams building fine-grained, relationship-based permissions (sharing, hierarchies, multi-tenant B2B) at scale who want Zanzibar semantics without building them. | Engineering teams that need fine-grained authorization (RBAC, ABAC, PBAC, or ReBAC) in their applications and want to manage access-control policy separately from application code — particularly in microservices architectures, or where the same policies must consistently govern applications, API gateways, data platforms, and AI agents. |
| Short description | Maker of SpiceDB, the Apache-2.0 "open source permissions database" inspired by Google Zanzibar, offered self-hosted, as usage-priced AuthZed Cloud, as Dedicated cloud, or as a licensed self-hosted enterprise build. | Cerbos is an authorization management platform built around an open source policy decision point (PDP). It enforces fine-grained RBAC, ABAC, PBAC, and ReBAC policies for applications, APIs, workloads, and AI agents. |
| Company size | startup, smb, mid_market, enterprise | Startup, Mid-market, Enterprise |
| Deployment | saas, self_hosted | Self-hosted, SaaS / Cloud-hosted (Cerbos Hub) |
| Source | open core | Open source (Apache 2.0) |
| Pricing model | usage-based / enterprise | Free (open source PDP, self-hosted); Cerbos Hub (control plane) commercial pricing available |
| Integrations | PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, Google Cloud Spanner, MySQL, Kubernetes, gRPC, Go, Node.js | gRPC, REST, JavaScript, Go, Python, Java, .NET, Rust |
| Categories | Authorization, Non-Human Identity, AI Agent Identity | |
| Claimed profile |
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