Cerbos - 2026 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Cerbos is an authorization layer and access control system designed to provide secure, decoupled, and extensible access controls for applications. It helps users externalize policy-based runtime authorization, allowing developers to replace complex authorization logic with a single API call.

Open source Cerbos Policy Decision Points(PDPs) can be deployed across distributed architectures for local, runtime authorization. Cerbos Hub provides a central Policy Administration point to manage, monitor, and audit authorization.

Cerbos PDPs are serverless, stateless, self-hosted services you can run as a sidecar alongside your application. In distributed architectures, Cerbos lets you place a PDP at every microservice and keep all of them up-to-date and synchronized.

Cerbos supports authorization across environments—on-premise, cloud, Kubernetes, serverless setups. Cerbos Hub users can also deploy embedded PDPs on device, in-browser, and in serverless environments using our WASM bundle. We offer SDKs for almost any language, and pre-built integrations for popular frameworks. Cerbos is compatible with any identity provider.

Policies are defined and managed centrally, enabling product owners and security teams to evolve access controls without modifying the core application.

Key features of the Cerbos authorization solution:

Policy-driven RBAC and ABAC

Permissions-aware data filtering

Admin API

Stateless design

Runtime policy evaluation

Collaborative policy playground

WASM-embedded Policy Decision Points

Unified audit logging

Scoped policies

Derived roles

GitOps and CI/CD

Central orchestration and monitoring

Flexible deployment models

Cerbos is a proud member of the OpenID Foundation AuthZen working group for interoperability in authorization.

Cerbos is SOC2 Type II Certified