Best 8 Permit.io Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Building and maintaining robust access control within your applications can be a headache.

Imagine constantly rewriting permissions code, struggling with scalability, or wishing for a more user-friendly interface.

This problem caused many organizations to start using Permit, but while Permit.io provides some good features, its functionalities don't align with the needs of many organizations, hence the need for alternatives.

If you’re exploring Permit.io alternatives, you’re likely looking for better pricing, more customization, features, or improved support. In this article, we’ll explore 8 top alternatives to Permit, highlighting their unique features, pros and cons, and pricing structures.

By the end, you’ll have the insights needed to choose the best solution for your access controls, security, and business growth.

Why You Might Look for Permit Alternatives?

In its defense, Permit has a couple of great features:

▶️ Customizable role templates that streamline the setup process by providing predefined roles that can be easily modified to fit specific organizational needs.

▶️ Support for dynamic permissions that adjust in real-time based on user behavior or contextual data, offering a high level of security and flexibility.

▶️ Customizable role templates that streamline the setup process by providing predefined roles that can be easily modified to fit specific organizational needs.

The downsides, however, outweigh the benefits for companies or developers who require better performance requirements, need better data consistency, or need greater flexibility and customization.

Let’s look at these downsides in more detail.

Performance Requirements for Large-Scale Applications

For organizations with stringent performance requirements, especially those operating in distributed microservices environments, Permit.io's performance might not be sufficient.

Access control checks need to be lightning-fast, ideally within tens of milliseconds, to handle thousands of requests per second. Many users have reported latency and performance issues with Permit.io, leading them to seek alternatives like Permify.

Permify's architecture, inspired by Google Zanzibar, incorporates various caching mechanisms to optimize performance. This allows for access checks to be executed in a fraction of a second, even under heavy loads.

Need for Data Consistency

Another major reason why some organizations look for alternatives to Permit.io is the need to manage high volumes of data consistently. In systems inspired by Google's Zanzibar, such as those implemented by some Permit competitors, the support for 'zookie' consistency tokens is a critical feature.

Each permission write generates a unique token (zookie) representing that particular write, ensuring that clients can perform runtime checks that are consistent up to that write. This mechanism helps prevent issues like the 'new-enemy problem,' where permissions checks could be incorrect due to changes being read out of order.

With Zookie support, these systems can guarantee data consistency at a much higher throughput, which is essential for scenarios that require accurate 'read after write' operations. Companies with stringent consistency requirements often seek alternatives that provide this level of assurance.

Need for Greater Flexibility and Customization

While Permit offers a user-friendly interface and pre-built features, it is too restrictive and does not provide the level of flexibility and customization required by most organizations. This is problematic because developers often need to tailor their chosen authorization system to fit complex workflows and unique application architectures.

This need for deep customization can drive teams to explore alternatives that allow for extensive customization and give developers greater control over authorization logic. When flexibility and the ability to deeply customize the system are essential, organizations generally find Permit lacking and opt for more adaptable alternatives.

What are the best alternatives to Permit?

• Permify — High-performance permission management with advanced caching and consistency.
• Oso — Flexible, customizable authorization system for various tech stacks.
• SpiceDB — Distributed, scalable database for Google Zanzibar-inspired permissions.
• Cerbos — Open-source, fine-grained access control with advanced policy management.
• Aserto — Real-time policy updates for managing complex authorization at scale.
• Warrant — Simple yet powerful multi-application authorization management.
• OpenFGA — Scalable, open-source, fine-grained authorization for developers.
• Casbin — Versatile open-source authorization library with support for multiple access control models.

#1. Permify:

Starting with Permify, a flexible and scalable access control solution designed to help businesses manage user permissions and authorization across various platforms. Inspired by Google's authorization system, Zanzibar, Permify allows you to securely and efficiently centralize your authorization processes.

Permify is our own product, but we’ve painstakingly tried to make this article as unbiased as possible to show you why it should be your go-to alternative authorization tool instead of Permit.

Let’s look at the features that position Permify at the top of our lists.

Permify Feature #1: Centralized Authorization

Need all your authorization in one place? We got you!

Permify uses a battle-tested authorization-as-a-service model that makes it easy to manage and enforce access control policies across your entire application ecosystem from a single location. This eliminates the need for scattered authorization logic throughout your codebase, ensuring consistency and reducing complexity even in complex, high-performance scenarios.

By consolidating authorization processes, Permify allows businesses to maintain stringent security standards while reducing the overhead associated with managing permissions in large-scale, microservices-based architectures. Even as your organization grows, your authorization scales with you, making it easy to manage permissions across an expanding number of connected applications and users.

Permify Feature #2: Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA)

Permify's fine-grained authorization (FGA) capabilities allow you to define and enforce highly granular access control policies, ensuring that users only have access to the specific data and resources they need to perform their tasks.

This feature allows organizations to define detailed, nuanced access policies that can adapt to various user roles, contexts, and scenarios. With FGA, we support the creation of complex permission structures, ensuring that only the right individuals have access to sensitive data and actions, thereby enhancing security and compliance across the board.

Permify Feature #3: Multi-Tenancy

Permify's multi-tenancy feature enables you to securely manage multiple tenants or organizations within a single Permify instance. This is particularly useful for organizations that serve multiple customers or have different departments with distinct security requirements. With this, you can segregate data and permissions across different tenants, ensuring that each client or user group operates within its own secure, isolated environment.

By consolidating multiple tenants into a single Permify instance, you can reduce your overall infrastructure costs and simplify management while maintaining flexibility in how you manage and organize your tenants, allowing you to adapt to your organization's specific needs.

Permify Pricing

We offer a free plan and two paid plans, each structured to grow with your business. Here are the details of each plan:

• Open Source: This free and unlimited plan is designed for individuals and small teams to get started with Permify. It provides the essential features: ReBAC, RBAC & ABAC support, disk and DB-based storage, multi-tenancy support, and scenario-based model testing. With this plan, you can test and evaluate Permify's capabilities before upgrading to a paid plan.
• Cloud: This package, priced according to the number of your monthly active users, offers everything in the Open Source plan plus more security, support, and scalability needs, among others.
• On-Premise: For large organizations with more complex needs, this package offers dedicated support, advanced features, and custom infrastructure specifically tailored to your company’s needs. The plan is priced based on custom quotes, which can be obtained by contacting our sales team.

How Does Permit Compare to Permify?

Permit.io is great for organizations that need a user-friendly interface and seamless integration with modern tech stacks. It offers fine-grained access control that is easy to implement, making it a solid choice for teams looking for a straightforward solution to manage permissions across applications.

However, Permify shines in all these areas as well as other places where Permit.io falls short. Permify is great for those who require centralized authorization and fine-grained control in high-performance environments, particularly those running distributed microservices.

Additionally, Permify’s multi-tenancy support offers a level of flexibility and security that is ideal for organizations managing multiple clients or environments. While Permit can handle a certain level of traffic, Permify's architecture, inspired by Google Zanzibar, is designed for much higher performance and scalability.

All of these make Permify a better option for businesses with complex, large-scale authorization needs that demand both consistency and scalability.

Permify Pros and Cons

• High-Performance Authorization: Permify excels in delivering lightning-fast access control checks, making it ideal for environments with demanding performance requirements.
• Open-Source Flexibility: As an open-source solution, Permify allows for extensive customization, giving developers full control over the authorization logic.
• Integration with popular frameworks: Permify integrates seamlessly with popular frameworks like Spring Boot, Node.js, and .NET, making it easy to incorporate into existing applications.
• Requires technical expertise: Implementing and managing Permify requires a certain level of technical expertise, particularly for organizations with complex authorization requirements.
• Potential Overhead for Simple Use Cases: For organizations with less complex authorization needs, Permify's advanced features might feel like overkill and add unnecessary complexity.

#2 OSO

Oso is a powerful open-source authorization framework designed to help developers easily implement and manage authorization logic in their applications. Oso uses a policy engine that allows you to write authorization rules using a declarative policy language called Polar. It also provides a simple and intuitive API for defining and enforcing policies, making it a popular choice for developers seeking a lightweight and customizable authorization solution.

Best For: Small to medium-sized organizations that require a simple and efficient authorization solution.

Similar to: Casbin, OpenFGA, Permit

While Permit is a comprehensive identity and access management platform, OSO is specifically designed as an authorization library. This means that OSO focuses on providing a flexible and customizable way to define and enforce policies rather than offering a full suite of identity and access management features.

Who Is It For?

Oso is particularly well-suited for those who need a solution that can adapt to complex, evolving permission use cases.

Oso’s Top Features

• Oso’s Polar language allows developers to write concise and expressive authorization rules directly within their application code.
• With Oso, authorization checks are performed directly within the application, ensuring that access control logic is enforced consistently across all areas of the app.
• Oso is open-source, allowing developers to extend and modify the framework to meet their specific needs.

OSO Pricing

• Developer (Free): This tier is perfect for developers who want to experiment with OSO and learn its capabilities without any cost.
• Pro ($149/month): Ideal for growing teams that need reliable performance and basic support for production environments.
• Growth (Custom): For organizations with advanced security requirements, demanding SLAs, and dedicated support needs. This tier offers tailored pricing plans to meet specific needs.
• OSO Migration Services ($9.9k): If you're transitioning from another authorization solution, OSO's expert migration services can help you move seamlessly within one month.

OSO Pros and Cons

• Pros:

  • Oso is designed to be lightweight, making it a good fit for applications where performance and minimal overhead are critical.
  • OSO can be easily integrated into various programming languages and frameworks, making it a versatile choice for different applications.
  • OSO has a growing and active community of developers, offering support and resources.

• Cons:

  • For organizations with highly complex authorization needs, OSO may require additional customization or extensions, potentially increasing implementation time and complexity.
  • While OSO offers robust capabilities, it lacks some advanced enterprise features like multi-tenancy support, which might not be ideal for all organizations.

#3: SpiceDB

Best for: Organizations that require scalable, distributed permission management systems for large-scale applications,

Similar to: OpenFGA, Permify

SpiceDB is a highly scalable, distributed database designed specifically for managing fine-grained permissions. Like Permify, it’s inspired by Zanzibar, and it excels in environments where complex authorization requirements need to be managed at scale, offering a flexible and powerful solution for developers and organizations that demand high levels of consistency and performance in their access control systems.

Unlike Permit.io, SpiceDB is designed to handle the most demanding use cases, ensuring that access control remains fast, reliable, and consistent even as the application scales.

Who Is It For?

SpiceDB is ideal for organizations and development teams that operate large-scale applications requiring robust and scalable permission management.

SpiceDB’s Top Features

• SpiceDB is built on principles inspired by Google Zanzibar, offering a highly scalable and consistent authorization system designed to handle the most demanding access control use cases.
• SpiceDB provides developers with the flexibility to define and manage custom authorization policies, allowing for a high degree of control over how permissions are structured and enforced within an application.

SpiceDB’s Pricing

SpiceDB offers a versatile pricing model to suit various project requirements. Developers can start experimenting and evaluating the platform with their free tier. For production deployments, SpiceDB provides customized pricing plans based on resource consumption or subscription options, offering a range of features and support levels.

SpiceDB Pros and Cons

• Pros:

  • SpiceDB is built for scalability, making it ideal for large-scale applications that require consistent and reliable permission management.
  • Designed to operate seamlessly in distributed environments, SpiceDB excels in microservices architectures and other complex deployments.
  • The system delivers low-latency access control checks, ensuring fast and efficient operation even under heavy loads.

• Cons:

  • Running SpiceDB effectively may require significant infrastructure resources, which could be a drawback for organizations with limited budgets or simpler use cases.
  • SpiceDB’s lack of multi-tenancy authorization means managing permissions across different tenants with this tool is complex and error-prone, potentially compromising security and scalability in multi-tenant environments.

#4: Cerbos

Best for: Businesses that prioritize security and compliance.

Similar to: Oso, Aserto

Cerbos is an open-source, flexible authorization layer that offers a powerful policy language, real-time policy evaluation, and integration with popular cloud providers. It's designed to be scalable and performant, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

Cerbos is better suited for organizations that need deep customization and fine-grained control over their authorization policies, while Permit.io, which focuses on ease of use and integration

Who Is It For?

It’s particularly well-suited for organizations looking to separate their authorization logic from the application code to ensure easier management, scalability, and compliance.

Cerbos’ Top Features

• Cerbos is optimized for performance, ensuring that authorization checks are executed quickly and efficiently.
• Cerbos excels at managing detailed and nuanced permissions, allowing you to implement fine-grained access controls that align with your organization’s security requirements.
• Cerbos provides detailed audit logs, allowing you to track and monitor access control activities.

Cerbos Pricing

Cerbos offers a flexible pricing model that caters to different types of users, from open-source enthusiasts to growing businesses and large enterprises.

• Open Source (Free forever): This plan allows you to run Cerbos anywhere, either on-premise or in the cloud. It includes access to YAML-based policy definition, audit logs, CI/CD & IDE tooling, and support for Git, Disk, Cloud, or DB-based storage.
• Start ($0/month for up to 100 monthly active principals): This plan builds on the open-source features and adds central management of unlimited Policy Decision Points (PDPs), in-browser/serverless authorization, a managed CI/CD pipeline, and unified audit logs.
• Growth: Starting at $25/month, this plan is designed for businesses that need system-wide authorization management and auditing. It includes multiple workspaces, support & uptime SLA, and live chat support.
• Enterprise: For large organizations, Cerbos offers an Enterprise plan with customized pricing. This plan includes SSO support, premium support SLA, quarterly training, custom training support, and phone support.

Cerbos Pros and Cons

• Pros:

  • Cerbos allows you to define custom policies that are tailored to your specific needs, providing greater flexibility and control.
  • Cerbos can be integrated with popular identity providers, such as Auth0, Okta, and Keycloak.
  • Cerbos is great for complex ABAC use cases.

• Cons:

  • Although Cerbos is great at ABAC, it has limited ReBAC support, making it difficult to handle granular ReBAC permissions such as parent-child hierarchies, organizations, and user grouping in Cerbos
  • Cerbos is not as dedicated to scalability as Zanzibar based solutions and does not provide a standard approach to storing authorization data.

#5 Aserto

Best for: Real-time policy updates for managing complex authorization at scale.

Similar to: SpiceDB, Cerbos

Aserto is a modern authorization-as-a-service platform designed to make it easy for developers to implement fine-grained access control in their applications. It provides a cloud-native solution that allows you to manage and enforce authorization policies in real-time across multiple environments.

While Permit.io offers ease of use and broad integration, Aserto focuses on providing a robust and flexible solution for real-time authorization needs.

Who is it for?

Aserto is ideal for teams that prioritize agility and need to update and enforce authorization policies in real time to adapt to evolving security requirements.

Aserto’s Top Features

• Built for modern cloud-native applications, Aserto integrates seamlessly with your existing cloud infrastructure, making it easier to manage authorization across distributed systems.
• Aserto offers a powerful and intuitive API, enabling developers to implement and manage authorization with minimal friction while maintaining full control over the authorization logic.
• Aserto allows you to define custom policies that are tailored to your specific needs, providing greater flexibility and control.

Aserto Pricing

Aserto offers a tiered pricing model that caters to a wide range of needs:

• Starter (Free forever): This plan is ideal for personal projects, open-source software, and commercial users evaluating Aserto. It includes 50 policy repositories, 100 authorizer instances, support for up to 1,000 users, and integration with code repositories like GitHub and GitLab.
• Essentials ($0.20 per user/month): This plan is best for small teams or early-stage startups that use Auth0 for authentication and don't need audit trails of decision logs. It includes everything in the free tier, plus unlimited policy repositories, unlimited authorizer instances, and support for up to 5,000 users.
• Pro (Custom pricing): This plan is designed for SaaS vendors that need an enterprise-ready authorization solution. It includes everything in the Essentials plan, plus unlimited users, integration with GitHub/GitLab Enterprise, support for identity providers like Okta and Azure AD, etc.
• Enterprise (Custom pricing): Tailored for enterprises that want to create an authorization control plane for all of their internal applications. This plan includes everything in the Pro plan, plus signed policy images, a self-hosted IDP gateway, the ability to run in your own VPC, 180-day decision log retention, and 24x7 email support.

Aserto Pros and Cons

• Pros:

  • Designed for modern, cloud-native environments, Aserto seamlessly integrates with your cloud infrastructure.
  • Aserto integrates seamlessly with popular frameworks like Spring Boot, Node.js, and .NET.
  • Aserto allows you to define custom policies that are tailored to your specific needs, providing greater flexibility and control.

• Cons:

  • As usage scales, the cost can increase significantly, which might be a concern for organizations with large numbers of users or API calls.
  • Aserto may not have the same level of community support as some other open-source authorization platforms.

#6 Warrant

Best for: Organizations that need a scalable and performant authorization solution.

Similar to: OpenFGA, Permify, SpiceDB

Warrant offers a flexible policy language, real-time policy evaluation, and integration with popular programming languages and frameworks. It's designed to be scalable and performant, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

Warrant offers greater flexibility in terms of deployment and customization tham Permit.

Who Is It For?

Warrant is a great choice for SaaS companies, platforms with complex user hierarchies, and any application that demands consistent and scalable permission management across multiple tenants or user groups.

Warrant’s Top Features

• Warrant excels in environments where multi-tenancy is crucial, providing tools to define and enforce consistent permissions across different tenants with ease.
• Warrant is built to scale, ensuring that your authorization system can grow alongside your application, handling increased traffic and more complex permission structures as needed.
• Warrant’s API and dashboard make it easy to create and manage roles, permissions, and access control rules, reducing the complexity of implementing authorization.

Warrant Pricing

• Free ($0/month): This tier is perfect for small projects and prototypes. It includes up to 500 warrants and up to 50,000 operations per month.
• Startup (Starting at $250/month): This plan is designed for growing apps and startups and includes up to 10,000 warrants. Additional warrants can be added at a rate of $10 per month for every additional 1,000 warrants.
• Enterprise (Custom pricing): Tailored for businesses with large-scale or custom requirements, the Enterprise plan includes everything in the Startup tier plus custom quotas with volume discounts, managed or self-hosted options, custom data retention policies, dedicated enterprise support, detailed event & audit logs, and enterprise SLAs, security, and compliance.

Warrant Pros and Cons

• Pros:

  • It offers flexibility for developers to tailor the authorization logic to fit unique application requirements.
  • Provides a straightforward pricing model that scales with your application, making it accessible for projects of all sizes.
  • Warrant is optimized for performance, ensuring that authorization checks are executed quickly and efficiently.

• Cons:

  • Teams without strong technical skills may find Warrant’s API-first approach challenging to implement and manage.
  • Warrant requires a dedicated infrastructure to run, which can add to your operational costs.

#7 OpenFGA

Best for: Managing fine-grained permissions across distributed systems, particularly those with complex access control requirements.

Similar to: SpiceDB, Casbin, Permit

OpenFGA is an open-source authorization platform that offers a simple and intuitive API for defining and enforcing policies. Considered one of Permit’s biggest competitors, it's designed to be scalable and performant, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

Unlike Permit.io, which is designed for ease of use and rapid implementation, OpenFGA is built to handle complex, fine-grained permissions at scale.

Who is it For?

OpenFGA is designed for developers and organizations that need to manage complex, fine-grained access control across large, distributed systems.

OpenFGA’s Top Features

• OpenFGA is built on principles inspired by Google Zanzibar, providing a scalable and consistent authorization system designed to handle complex access control needs across distributed systems.
• Designed to manage permissions for large, distributed applications, OpenFGA scales efficiently to handle a vast number of users, resources, and operations with low latency.
• OpenFGA allows developers to define highly specific and nuanced access control policies, making it possible to implement unique and complex authorization models.

OpenFGA Pricing

OpenFGA itself is free to use under its open-source license, making it accessible for organizations of all sizes. However, deploying and managing OpenFGA comes with its own set of costs, primarily related to infrastructure, maintenance, and support.

OpenFGA Pros and Cons

• Pros:

  • OpenFGA is designed to be highly scalable and able to handle large and complex authorization workloads.
  • OpenFGA is designed for low-latency access control checks, ensuring that authorization decisions are made quickly, even as the complexity and volume of data increase.
  • It also benefits from the continuous improvements and support of an active open-source community with the ability to contribute back.

• Cons:

  • While the software itself is free, organizations should be aware of potential costs related to infrastructure, scaling, and support if managing the deployment in-house.
  • Unlike some other services, OpenFGA does not come with built-in support or monitoring, requiring organizations to manage these aspects independently.

# 8 Casbin

Best for: Flexible and high-performance authorization enforcement.

Similar to: Oso, OpenFGA, Permify

The last alternative to Permit we’ll consider is Casbin. Casbin is an open-source authorization library that supports access control models like ACL, RBAC, ABAC, and more. It’s designed to be highly flexible, allowing developers to implement and manage complex access control systems within their applications.

Casbin offers greater flexibility and customization than Permit, allowing developers to implement a wide range of access control models (ACL, RBAC, ABAC, etc.) directly within their code.

Who is it for?

Casbin is ideal for developers and technical teams who need a versatile and embeddable authorization solution that supports multiple access control models.

Casbin’s Top Features

• With Casbin, you can define and enforce very detailed and granular access control policies, ensuring that only authorized users can access specific resources or perform certain actions.
• Casbin is extremely flexible and supports Golang, Java, PHP, and Node.js with a consistent API. This means learning Casbin once allows you to seamlessly integrate it into various projects, saving time and effort.
• Casbin is a lightweight, embeddable library that can be integrated directly into your application’s codebase. This makes it ideal for projects where external dependencies need to be minimized.

Casbin Pricing

Casbin is an open-source authorization library, which means that it is free to use for any purpose. The open-source nature of Casbin provides organizations with a cost-effective solution for implementing fine-grained access control within their applications.

Casbin Pros and Cons

• Pros:

  • As an open-source library, Casbin is free to use, making it a highly cost-effective solution for implementing authorization in your applications.
  • Casbin’s open-source nature allows for deep customization, enabling developers to tailor the authorization logic to fit specific requirements.
  • Casbin provides detailed audit logs, allowing you to track and monitor access control activities, and can be integrated with popular identity providers, such as Auth0 and Okta.

• Cons:

  • Implementing and managing Casbin effectively requires a strong understanding of access control models and development expertise, which may present a challenge for less technical teams.
  • Casbin lacks the built-in scalability and persistence needed for microservices environments and requires additional infrastructure for distributed state management, making it less suited for large-scale, dynamic systems.

Next Steps: Get Fine-Grained Authorization with Permify

The authorization platforms we've explored offer valuable features, but they may not be the perfect fit for every need. Each tool on our list offers unique strengths and features, making them suitable for different use cases.

• If you need a highly customizable, open-source solution alternative to Permit, tools like OpenFGA or Casbin are excellent choices. They provide the flexibility to implement detailed, fine-grained access controls directly within your application.
• If you’re looking for a simple, API-first solution that offers multi-tenant support and a straightforward integration process, Warrant might be the right fit for you.

But if you want a solution that combines advanced performance, fine-grained access control, and the ability to manage permissions across distributed microservices environments, Permify is your best choice.

Permify offers centralized authorization with high scalability, multi-tenancy support, and the flexibility of open-source customization, all designed to meet the needs of growing businesses and complex applications.

Start your journey with Permify today to ensure that your application’s authorization is both powerful and scalable, tailored to your exact requirements.