OpenFGA vs Cerbos
Side-by-side comparison of identity tools. Sponsored placement is disclosed where applicable.
Quick answer
OpenFGA vs Cerbos: which should you choose?
Short answer
OpenFGA 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
- OpenFGA: Product engineering teams building multi-tenant SaaS with document-sharing, folder-hierarchy or org/team permission models who want a self-hostable Zanzibar-style engine with a vendor-neutral foundation home. · 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
- OpenFGACerbosIAM Stack FinderBuyer resources
| Attribute | ||
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Product engineering teams building multi-tenant SaaS with document-sharing, folder-hierarchy or org/team permission models who want a self-hostable Zanzibar-style engine with a vendor-neutral foundation home. | 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 | OpenFGA is an Apache 2.0 authorization engine, inspired by Google's Zanzibar paper, that stores relationship tuples and answers permission checks via gRPC/HTTP APIs. Originally built by Auth0/Okta, it is now a CNCF Incubating project with a hosted Auth0 FGA option. | 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, saas | Self-hosted, SaaS / Cloud-hosted (Cerbos Hub) |
| Source | open source | Open source (Apache 2.0) |
| Pricing model | free (open source); enterprise quote for hosted Auth0 FGA | Free (open source PDP, self-hosted); Cerbos Hub (control plane) commercial pricing available |
| Integrations | Go, Node.js, JavaScript, Python, Java, .NET, gRPC, REST | gRPC, REST, JavaScript, Go, Python, Java, .NET, Rust |
| Categories | Authorization | Authorization, Non-Human Identity, AI Agent Identity |
| Claimed profile |
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