Top 7 Axiomatics Alternatives for 2024

Searching for the best Axiomatics alternatives to manage fine-grained access control for your enterprise applications? You're in the right place.

Picture this: your company is scaling, your applications are growing in complexity, and suddenly, your existing authorization solution (Axiomatics) feels like it’s holding you back. Maybe it’s too rigid, difficult to manage, or just doesn’t meet your evolving security needs. If you’ve found yourself in this scenario, you’re not alone—many companies are exploring alternatives to Axiomatics for more flexibility, better integrations, or just a simpler user experience.

In this article, we’ll dive into the top 7 Axiomatics alternatives you should consider in 2024. 

We’ll cover each platform’s key features, strengths, use cases, and potential limitations, helping you find the perfect fit for your organization’s access control needs.

Let’s get started!

Why You Might Look for Axiomatics Alternatives?

In its defense, Axiomatics excels in a few ways:

▶️ Dynamic Authorization: Axiomatics excels in dynamic, context-aware access control, enabling businesses to enforce fine-grained authorization policies in real-time.
▶️ Enterprise-Grade Security: It provides robust, enterprise-grade security for organizations dealing with complex data and compliance requirements, particularly in sectors like finance and healthcare.

The downsides, however, outweigh the benefits for organizations needing more scalability, easier integration, or streamlined policy management. Here are a few reasons people leave axiomatics for other options: 

Integration Challenges

A major reason companies look for alternatives is integration challenges. Axiomatics offers strong functionality, but the integration process can be cumbersome, especially when integrating with modern SaaS solutions or cloud-native environments. 

For businesses needing a more seamless integration experience, these challenges can make scaling with Axiomatics difficult.

Scalability Concerns

While Axiomatics offers strong dynamic authorization, it struggles with scalability when compared to modern solutions like Zanzibar. These newer solutions, such as Google's Zanzibar architecture, are optimized for large-scale applications and can handle vast numbers of access requests more efficiently. 

For businesses with rapidly growing user bases or increasingly complex access control needs, Axiomatics's performance limitations may become a bottleneck. In contrast, Zanzibar-based architectures can handle millions of requests per second with lower latency, making them more suitable for high-demand environments.

Moving Away from XACML

Another significant factor influencing companies to explore alternatives is the desire to move away from the XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) model that Axiomatics relies on. XACML, while powerful, can be cumbersome and difficult to manage, especially in terms of policy authoring and decision-making processes. 

XACML was also designed in a different era of technology, and its integration with modern, cloud-native services and microservices architectures can be cumbersome, unlike newer policy-as-code solutions that are designed to work seamlessly with DevOps workflows.

What Are the Best Alternatives to Axiomatics?

The best alternatives to Axiomatics are solutions that provide fine-grained access control while offering more flexibility, easier integration, or reduced complexity. Here are the top alternatives to Axiomatics:

• Permify — High-performance permission management with multi-tenant support and customizable RBAC/ReBAC/ABAC policies.

• Oso — Great for developers looking for a simple, policy-driven authorization engine that integrates directly into their codebase.

• Aserto — Focused on providing fine-grained authorization as a service, with easy integration for cloud-native applications.

• Cerbos — A flexible, open-source alternative that enables fine-grained permissions management with support for various authorization models.

• Casbin — Highly customizable and open-source, ideal for complex enterprise environments that need a variety of access control models.

• Open Policy Agent (OPA) — Best for organizations needing policy-driven security for cloud-native and microservices architectures.

• SpiceDB (Authzed) — Built for large-scale, distributed systems, offering highly scalable fine-grained access control inspired by Google Zanzibar.

#1 Permify 

At the top of our Axiomatics alternatives list is Permify, a flexible, open-source fine-grained access control solution designed for modern SaaS applications. 

Full disclosure: Permify is our own product, but we aim to provide an unbiased perspective on why it’s truly the top alternative to Axiomatics.

So, why did we put Permify at the top of our list? Because it checks all the right boxes for what you need in a flexible, scalable authorization platform. Here are some key features that make us stand out:

Multi-Tenant Authorization

Our multi-tenant support is built to serve organizations that cater to multiple customers (tenants) with varying permissions and roles. 

This feature enables developers to manage authorization for multiple tenants from a single instance of the application, streamlining user management and access control.

With our solution, developers can define tenant-specific roles and permissions through an intuitive policy engine, meaning each tenant can have its own set of roles (e.g., admin, editor, viewer) and permissions without impacting other tenants. 

Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA) Modeling

Permify excels in Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA) modeling, empowering organizations to define highly specific and detailed access control policies. 

FGA allows for precise control over who can access what, under which conditions, and in which contexts. 

Unlike traditional role-based access control (RBAC) systems, which offer broader, role-level permissions, our FGA modeling lets you create policies that consider multiple attributes such as user roles, data sensitivity, location, time, and more. 

This granular control allows businesses to implement dynamic, context-aware permissions that align closely with their unique operational needs, offering superior security and flexibility.

Flexible and Scalable Architecture

Permify uses a modular design based on Google’s Zanzibar that allows organizations to scale the platform up or down based on their specific requirements. We designed it this way so our tool can grow alongside your organization without requiring significant infrastructure changes.

Organizations can simply start with a basic Permify setup and easily add functionality as their access control needs evolve. This scalability helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in and ensures they have a platform that can adapt to their changing environment. 

Permify Pricing

We offer a free plan along with two paid options, each designed to scale with your business. Here’s a breakdown of what each plan includes:

• Starter: Our free, unlimited plan is perfect for individuals and small teams looking to explore Permify. This plan provides essential features such as access to the Centralized Authorization Cloud and support for RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC, making it suitable for various authorization models. It also includes multi-tenancy support, observability and monitoring dashboards, and a spot datastore for basic data storage needs.

• Growth: This plan is priced based on the number of monthly active users and includes all the features of the Starter plan, plus other features such as auditing logs, access to a private API, and support for unlimited production and development projects. It also provides a dedicated datastore and enterprise API integrations, ensuring smooth and secure data handling. 

• Enterprise: This plan is designed for large organizations with complex infrastructure and deployment needs. It offers advanced features such as a dedicated account engineer to provide personalized support, on-premise deployment options for businesses requiring local infrastructure, and custom solutions for deployment and backup retention. This plan also includes priority features that can be tailored to the organization's specific needs, along with volume discounts and Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) for those managing larger-scale operations

How Does Permify Compare to Axiomatics?

Axiomatics is great for large enterprises with complex, highly specific access control needs. Its strength lies in providing dynamic, fine-grained authorization with a focus on compliance and security in industries like finance and healthcare.

However, Permify is great at all that too, while being better for organizations that need a more flexible, scalable, and developer-friendly approach. While Axiomatics can be complex and challenging to implement, Permify focuses on making fine-grained access control easier to manage and integrate with modern applications. 

Our multi-tenant support, ABAC and ReBAC policies, and intuitive APIs offer more accessibility and customization for fast-growing businesses. Additionally, our real-time decision engine ensures low-latency access control, which is essential for performance-focused applications.

Permify Pros and Cons

• Scalability: Permify is designed for scalability, allowing organizations to start small and scale up as their user base grows. Our architecture, inspired by Google’s Zanzibar, supports performance at high user volumes.

• High-Performance Authorization: We deliver lightning-fast access control checks, making it ideal for environments with demanding performance requirements.

• Great Integrations: Permify is designed to work seamlessly with popular frameworks like Spring Boot, and Node.js, allowing for easy integration into your existing applications.

• Requires technical expertise: Implementing and managing Permify requires certain technical expertise, particularly for organizations with complex authorization requirements. However, Permify solves this problem by providing a dedicated account engineer for organizations that use the enterprise plan.

• Limited ABAC functionality: While Permify is excellent for most ABAC needs, it may fall short for users who need advanced ABAC functionalities

Oso

Oso is an open-source policy engine that allows developers to implement authorization directly into their codebase using simple, declarative policies. It provides flexible policy management, supports role-based access control (RBAC), and attribute-based access control (ABAC), making it ideal for dynamic authorization needs across various applications.

Best for: Flexible and customizable authorization solution focusing on code security and control.

Similar to: Open Policy Agent (OPA), Casbin

While Axiomatics is built for large enterprises with complex, regulatory-heavy authorization needs, Oso focuses on simplicity and ease of integration. It’s ideal for developers who want a lightweight solution that is easily embedded into their applications, offering more flexibility without needing large-scale infrastructure.

Who Is It For?

Oso is ideal for developers and engineering teams building custom applications that require flexible, fine-grained authorization without the need for complex infrastructure.

Oso Top Features

• Oso allows you to write authorization rules using a declarative language called Polar. This "policy-as-code" approach helps developers define access control rules in a simple and readable way, enabling version control and easy updates.

• Oso offers a high degree of flexibility and customization, allowing you to tailor the solution to your specific needs.  

• Oso allows for very granular permission controls, letting you define fine-grained access at the object or data level, which can be tailored to each user or context.

Oso Pricing

Oso offers a tiered pricing structure that caters to individual developers, growing teams, and enterprises with complex security needs, ensuring scalability and flexibility as your project grows.

• Developer (Free):  Full access to Oso’s policy engine for experimentation and learning, with community support.

• Pro Plan ($149/month): Reliable performance, basic support for production environments, and access to advanced features such as enhanced RBAC/ABAC control and auditing.

• Growth (Custom): Advanced security features, demanding SLAs, dedicated support, and tailored solutions for complex authorization needs.

• Oso Migration Services ($9.9k):  Expert migration services to help teams seamlessly transition from their existing authorization solution to Oso, completed within one month.

While Axiomatics focuses heavily on enterprise-level, large-scale deployments with complex infrastructure, Oso offers a more accessible pricing structure, starting with a free plan for developers and growing incrementally with custom options for larger teams.

Oso Pros and Cons

• Oso is compatible with multiple programming languages including Python, Ruby, Node.js, and Go, allowing for seamless integration across different tech stacks.

•  Oso's straightforward API and built-in rules engine enable rapid implementation of access control, reducing the time and effort needed to deploy and manage complex authorization requirements.

• Oso supports both RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), ReBAC (Relationship-based Access Control), and ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control), giving users flexibility in choosing the right model for their specific application needs.

• Though Polar is a powerful and declarative language, it may introduce a learning curve for developers unfamiliar with it, especially when dealing with complex policies.

• Oso's framework is built to simplify authorization, but this can also limit flexibility when organizations need to handle more complex or customized authorization flows.

Aserto

Best for: Cloud-native applications needing fine-grained, policy-based authorization.

Similar to: Oso, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Permify.

Aserto is a cloud-native authorization service designed to help developers implement fine-grained access control at scale. It supports both RBAC and ABAC models and integrates seamlessly with modern applications via its APIs. Aserto stands out for its strong focus on developer-friendly interfaces, easy integration, and scalable architecture, making it a strong choice for companies transitioning to cloud environments or needing more granular access control.

It’s a great alternative to axiomatics as it offers more flexibility and simplicity in integrating authorization into microservices and distributed systems.

Who Is It For?

Aserto is ideal for cloud-native developers and DevOps teams working on applications that require fine-grained access control across distributed systems and microservices. 

Aserto’s Top Features

• Aserto allows you to create policies that are driven by data, enabling you to dynamically adjust access controls based on changing conditions.

• Aserto provides detailed audit logs to track user activity and enforce compliance with regulatory requirements.

• Aserto allows you to define granular permissions for users, roles, and resources, ensuring that only authorized individuals can access sensitive data and perform specific actions.

Aserto Pricing

• Starter (Free Forever): 50 policy repositories, 100 authorizer instances, support for up to 1,000 users, and integration with GitHub and GitLab for policy management.

• Essentials ($0.20 per user/month): Everything in the free tier, plus unlimited policy repositories, unlimited authorizer instances, and support for up to 5,000 users.

• Pro (Custom Pricing): Everything in the Essentials plan, plus unlimited users, integration with GitHub/GitLab Enterprise, and support for identity providers such as Okta and Azure AD.

• Enterprise (Custom Pricing): Everything in the Pro plan, plus signed policy images, a self-hosted IDP gateway, the ability to run Aserto in your own VPC, 180-day decision log retention, and 24x7 email support.

Aserto Pros and Cons

• Aserto offers a wide range of features, including fine-grained access control, policy-as-code, RBAC, ABAC, and data-driven policies.

• Aserto offers robust APIs and SDKs, making integration seamless and reducing development time for teams.

• Aserto is built specifically for cloud-native applications, ensuring easy integration with modern architectures like microservices and serverless environments.

• While Aserto offers a good degree of customization, it may not be as flexible as some other solutions for organizations with highly specific or complex authorization requirements.

• Aserto simplifies authorization for straightforward use cases, but more complex policies may still require in-depth knowledge of OPA and its Rego policy language.

Cerbos 

Best for: Businesses that prioritize security and compliance.

Similar to: Oso, Aserto

Cerbos is an open-source authorization layer designed for modern applications, offering fine-grained permissions management with minimal configuration. Cerbos is known for its flexibility and ease of integration into any application stack, making it a strong contender for teams looking for an open-source solution that scales with their application's complexity.

Cerbos is designed for developers, focusing on flexibility and integration with modern cloud infrastructure. Axiomatics, on the other hand, focuses on compliance and enterprise-level security.

Who Is It For?

Cerbos's focus on developer experience and API-driven approach make it a great choice for teams looking to efficiently integrate authorization into their applications.

Cerbos Top Features

• Policies in Cerbos are written in code, making them easier to manage, version control, and test. This approach promotes consistency and reduces the risk of errors.

• Cerbos is fully open-source, giving developers complete visibility and control over the authorization layer. Its extensibility also allows teams to customize the platform to meet their specific needs.

• Cerbos operates as a stateless service, meaning that it evaluates authorization requests in real-time without storing any session or user data. This makes it lightweight and highly scalable.

Cerbos Pricing

Cerbos offers different pricing models to its users, from open-source users to startups and large enterprises.

• Open Source (Free forever): With this plan, you can use Cerbos both 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: Cerbos offers an Enterprise plan with customized pricing for large organizations. This plan includes SSO support, a premium support SLA, quarterly training, custom training support, and phone support.

Cerbos Pros and Cons

• Cerbos’s stateless, cloud-native architecture makes it ideal for microservices and distributed applications, ensuring fast and efficient policy evaluation.

• Cerbos's customizable policies and integrations allow organizations to tailor the solution to their specific needs.

• It supports RBAC, ABAC, and custom policies, enabling detailed control over who can access specific resources, actions, or data.

• Cerbos is not as dedicated to scalability as Zanzibar-based solutions and does not provide a standard approach to storing authorization data.

• Cerbos is strong in ABAC but falls short in ReBAC. It struggles to manage granular ReBAC permissions such as parent-child hierarchies, organizations, and user grouping.

Casbin

Best for: Flexible and high-performance authorization enforcement.

Similar to: Oso, OpenFGA, Permify

Casbin is an open-source authorization library that provides support for multiple access control models, including role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), and domain-based access control (DBAC). It’s a highly flexible solution that allows developers to define custom access policies for various use cases, making it a popular choice for teams that need a low-level, embeddable authorization system. 

Casbin’s strength lies in its flexibility and support for multiple access control models, while Axiomatics focuses on high-level enterprise features like compliance and dynamic authorization.

Who Is It For?

Casbin's focus on performance and scalability makes it suitable for high-traffic applications and large-scale deployments.

Casbin's Top Features

• Casbin is designed to be low-level and customizable, giving developers control over the entire authorization process. You can define your own policies, roles, and access control rules using Casbin’s simple syntax.

• Casbin can be easily integrated into various web frameworks and programming languages through middleware, making it compatible with many tech stacks like Go, Java, Node.js, Python, and others.

• Casbin supports various authorization models, including RBAC, ABAC, and custom models, allowing you to tailor the solution to your specific requirements.

Casbin Pricing

As an open-source library, Casbin offers organizations a free and budget-friendly way to implement granular access control within their applications.

Casbin Pros and Cons

• Casbin's open-source nature and support for multiple programming languages make it highly flexible and adaptable.

• Casbin gives developers complete control over their authorization logic, enabling them to define custom policies and rules that fit their specific needs.

• As an open-source project, Casbin is free to use and backed by an active community, which provides regular updates, contributions, and support.

• While Casbin is powerful as an authorization library, it cannot provide centralized authorization management across multiple services or applications. Organizations looking for a unified, centralized platform to manage authorization might find this limitation a challenge, especially as their infrastructure grows.

• While Casbin offers simple syntax for policy definitions, managing complex policies across large systems may require additional tooling or manual effort to ensure efficiency and scalability.

Open Policy Agent (OPA)

Best for: Organizations needing policy-driven security for cloud-native and microservices architectures.

Similar to: Casbin, Cerbos

OPA is a general-purpose policy engine that can be used for a variety of use cases, including authorization, compliance, and governance. It offers a flexible and customizable approach to policy management, allowing organizations to define and enforce policies across their entire infrastructure.

OPA is not specifically designed for authorization but can be used for various policy-related tasks, making it more versatile than Axiomatics.

Who Is It For?

OPA is ideal for DevOps teams, cloud-native developers, and security engineers who need a powerful, scalable solution to manage policies across distributed systems, microservices, and cloud environments.

OPA's Top Features

• OPA can be deployed as a standalone service or integrated into existing applications, providing greater flexibility and scalability.

• OPA integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes, making it easy to enforce policies across containerized workloads. 

• OPA operates as a lightweight agent that can be embedded into any service or application. It is designed to handle large-scale environments with low latency and high performance, making it suitable for mission-critical applications.

OPA Pricing

OPA is an open-source project, so it's free. However, depending on your organization's specific requirements, there may be additional costs associated with deployment, maintenance, and support.

OPA Pros and Cons

• OPA’s policy-as-code model allows developers to manage policies like any other code, making it highly adaptable and easy to integrate into DevOps pipelines.

• OPA is designed to scale across distributed systems, making it suitable for large-scale cloud-native environments and microservices.

• OPA has a large and active community that can provide valuable resources, support, and contributions.

• OPA's focus on developer experience may make it less intuitive for non-technical users.

• Rego, OPA’s policy language, can be difficult to learn for teams unfamiliar with declarative languages, leading to a longer onboarding time.

SpiceDB (Authzed)

Best for: High-performance and scalable authorization solution with a focus on real-time policy updates.

Similar to: OpenFGA, Aserto, Permify.

SpiceDB is an open-source, distributed database that manages complex, fine-grained permissions at scale. Built on the principles of Google’s Zanzibar architecture, SpiceDB enables developers to implement powerful access control systems that are both flexible and efficient.

While Axiomatics focuses on attribute-based and dynamic authorization for enterprise applications, SpiceDB is built for high scalability in cloud-native environments with complex, hierarchical access control needs. 

Who Is It For?

SpiceDB is ideal for large-scale SaaS platforms, cloud-native companies, and organizations managing complex, hierarchical permissions across distributed systems.

SpiceDB Top Features

• SpiceDB uses ReBAC, which allows you to define permissions based on the relationships between users, resources, and other entities.

• SpiceDB is built as a distributed system, allowing it to operate seamlessly across cloud environments and scale horizontally to handle large, distributed workloads.

• SpiceDB leverages a graph-based engine to evaluate permissions, allowing for highly efficient, complex permission queries.

SpiceDB Pricing

SpiceDB is a product of AuthZed, which offers three primary deployment options: 

• Serverless: A fully managed, shared infrastructure solution with usage-based (under 1 million requests or 1 million relationships per month) pricing. You're charged based on the number of relationships stored and operations performed.  

• Dedicated: A fully isolated private SaaS environment operated by AuthZed's SRE team. Pricing is tailored based on reserved vCPU capacity.  

• Self-Hosted: You manage SpiceDB in your own environment. Pricing is subscription-based. 

SpiceDB Pros and Cons

• Like Permify, SpicDB is built on the principles of Google’s Zanzibar and can handle large-scale, high-performance environments with millions of permission checks per second.

• SpiceDB is designed specifically for microservices architectures, providing seamless integration and optimized performance.

• Its ReBAC model allows for highly customizable and granular permissions based on relationships between users and resources.

• While the open-source version is powerful, it lacks enterprise-level features such as compliance tools and SLA-backed support, which are only available with the managed service.

• SpiceDB's focus on microservices and distributed systems may require a steeper learning curve for organizations new to these technologies.

Next Steps: Get Fine-Grained Authorization with Permify

Choosing the best alternative for your access control needs depends on what features and outcomes you value most.

If you need advanced compliance features and enterprise-level security, Axiomatics or Authzed (SpiceDB’s managed service) might be good options to consider. For open-source flexibility and a lightweight, developer-friendly solution, Oso and Casbin are excellent choices.

However, if you’re looking for a solution that:

• Offers flexible multi-tenant support for SaaS platforms,

• Combines fine-grained authorization with role-based and attribute-based access control,

• Provides a developer-first experience with easy integration and scalability,

…then Permify is your best choice. With our user-friendly APIs, robust policy management, and scalability, Permify delivers the best value for growing teams and SaaS platforms.

Sign up for Permify today and start building flexible, scalable access control into your application.