Cerbos vs Terraform
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Cerbos is an open-source authorization platform that externalizes and centralizes access control logic, eliminating authorization code scattered across application services.
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.
Acquired by IBM $6.4B Feb 2025 (HashiCorp); $646M revenue expected FY25; 500M+ downloads; 85% Fortune 500; integrated with Red Hat Ansible; IaC leader
About
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code tool originally created by HashiCorp, founded in 2012 in San Francisco by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar. Terraform introduced a declarative configuration language (HCL) that allowed engineers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure across any provider — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hundreds of others — through version-controlled configuration files. It became the de facto standard for cloud infrastructure automation and gave rise to the IaC category as it is known today.\n\nTerraform's core capability is its provider ecosystem, with 3,000+ providers enabling teams to manage infrastructure, SaaS services, and on-premises systems from a single workflow. HashiCorp built Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise on top of the open-source tool, adding team collaboration, remote state management, policy enforcement, and audit features for enterprise deployments. With 500M+ downloads and adoption by 85% of Fortune 500 companies, Terraform became one of the most widely used developer tools in cloud infrastructure.\n\nIn February 2025, IBM completed its $6.4B acquisition of HashiCorp, bringing Terraform under IBM's portfolio alongside Red Hat and other enterprise infrastructure products. FY2025 revenue for HashiCorp was projected at approximately $646M. The acquisition reflects Terraform's strategic importance in the hybrid cloud era and IBM's intent to integrate IaC capabilities into its broader cloud and automation platform. Despite a 2023 license change from MPL to BSL that sparked the OpenTofu fork, Terraform's commercial ecosystem and enterprise installed base remain dominant.
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