Cerbos vs Aleph Alpha

About

Cerbos is an open-source authorization solution founded in 2021 that provides a centralized policy decision point for application access control, allowing engineering teams to define, manage, and test authorization logic independently of application code. The platform uses a human-readable YAML policy language to define roles, permissions, and conditions, and exposes a simple API that microservices query to determine whether a user can perform a given action on a given resource. Cerbos addresses the problem of authorization logic becoming complex and fragmented as applications grow, typically spread across database queries, middleware, and application code in ways that are hard to audit, test, or modify. The company raised $7.5M in seed funding and offers a SaaS managed platform called Cerbos Hub for teams that want hosted policy management and audit logging. Cerbos is used by engineering teams at technology companies building multi-tenant SaaS products where fine-grained permission models are required. The platform supports attribute-based access control (ABAC), role-based access control (RBAC), and relationship-based access control patterns, making it flexible enough for complex enterprise authorization requirements.