Market map / Authorization & policy
Cerbos
A stateless, self-hostable policy decision point for application authorization.
- Category
- Stateless authorization (PDP)
- Lane
- Authorization & policy
- Founded
- 2021
- Ownership
- Private; VC-backed (seed, OMERS Ventures)
- HQ
- London, UK
Summary
Cerbos is an open-source, stateless authorization layer: a policy decision point that evaluates RBAC and ABAC policies as code, deployed next to your services, with Cerbos Hub for managed policy distribution. Keeping decisions stateless avoids storing a relationship graph.
Best for
Teams wanting decoupled, stateless policy decisions as code, self-hosted or via Cerbos Hub.
Consider if
You need native Zanzibar-style relationship graphs (ReBAC) as the core model.
Strengths
- Stateless PDP, language-agnostic
- Policies as code with testing
- Open source plus managed Hub
Considerations
- RBAC/ABAC-centric; ReBAC less native
- You supply the data for decisions