If you’re evaluating alternatives to Aserto after their announcement to sunset their SaaS platform, it's important to understand how other solutions stack up—not just in terms of features, but in architecture, operational burden, and long-term flexibility. In this post, we go deep into the technical differences between Aserto and Oso across critical areas like infrastructure, performance, modeling, and scalability.
For the full overview on why teams are moving away from Aserto and how to evaluate your next authorization provider, read the companion post: Migrating from Aserto? Why Oso is the Best Alternative.
Migration Tip: With Oso, you no longer need to maintain and tune edge nodes. Simply model your logic and let us handle uptime and performance.
POC Tip: Try filtering a list using a policy that includes a negation condition. For example, the policy might allow users to be banned from projects. A banned user shouldn’t be able to see a project, even if they still have a role on the project (not an uncommon scenario). When you ask: “Show all projects the user has access to,” Oso will return the correct list - excluding the banned projects based on the policy logic. Aserto can’t evaluate this kind of condition during list filtering; it only applies policy logic at decision time, not during traversal.
Example Aserto Limitation:
Negation in Rego
# Aserto can't filter lists when policy says:
allow if not banned
Negation in Oso:
polar
allow(user, "read", resource) if
not banned(user) and
has_permission(user, "read", resource);
Oso will correctly filter out banned users, Aserto won't without removing their relations manually.
Migration Tip: If latency of permissions propagation is a concern, Oso’s centralized but globally distributed model ensures sub-10ms evaluations without sync delays.
POC Tip: Model a team inside an org with delegated permissions. Oso models this in a few lines of Polar.
Migration Tip: If you’re running into scaling ceilings or planning to grow, Oso's hosted infrastructure lifts those limits.
POC Tip: Make a logic-only change. In Oso, push and test it immediately. Aserto requires environment or instance updates even for small changes.
POC Tip: Add a new permission or relationship and use it in logic. With Oso, you go from idea to enforcement in minutes, no manifest or build required.
When it comes to migrating authorization systems, technical details matter. Oso was built with developer experience, scalability, and clarity at its core—so you can model complex permissions without brittle workarounds or heavy infrastructure. Whether you’re dealing with nested groups, high data volumes, or rapid policy iteration, Oso gives you a modern, unified authorization solution you can trust.
Let us know if you'd like help translating your Aserto setup to Oso. We’ve done plenty of migrations and can help you go live in weeks, not months.