Open Policy Agent (OPA) vs Cerbos
Side-by-side comparison of identity tools. Sponsored placement is disclosed where applicable.
Quick answer
Open Policy Agent (OPA) vs Cerbos: which should you choose?
Short answer
Open Policy Agent (OPA) 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
- Open Policy Agent (OPA): Platform and security engineering teams that want one policy-as-code engine spanning application authorization, Kubernetes admission, service-mesh and infrastructure checks, and are prepared to operate it themselves. · 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
- Open Policy Agent (OPA)CerbosIAM Stack FinderBuyer resources
| Attribute | ||
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Platform and security engineering teams that want one policy-as-code engine spanning application authorization, Kubernetes admission, service-mesh and infrastructure checks, and are prepared to operate it themselves. | 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 | Open Policy Agent is an Apache 2.0, CNCF Graduated policy engine that evaluates Rego policies for application authorization, Kubernetes admission (Gatekeeper), Envoy/Istio, Terraform and CI/CD. It returns decisions; your services enforce them. | 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 | self_hosted | Self-hosted, SaaS / Cloud-hosted (Cerbos Hub) |
| Source | open source | Open source (Apache 2.0) |
| Pricing model | free (open source) | Free (open source PDP, self-hosted); Cerbos Hub (control plane) commercial pricing available |
| Integrations | Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio, Terraform, Kafka, Docker, AWS, Kong | gRPC, REST, JavaScript, Go, Python, Java, .NET, Rust |
| Categories | Authorization | Authorization, Non-Human Identity, AI Agent Identity |
| Claimed profile |
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