SpiceDB has become a popular choice for teams building fine-grained access control, especially when dealing with complex permission models and user-resource relationships. Built around the ideas in Google’s Zanzibar paper, it gives developers a scalable way to express relationship-based access logic, with performance and consistency controls that are production-ready.
That said, SpiceDB isn’t always the right fit for every team or every project. Maybe you’re working in a framework where embedding authorization logic directly in code feels more natural. Maybe you’d rather use a simpler policy engine without managing a dedicated datastore. Or maybe you’re just curious about how other tools approach the same challenge in a different way.
Whatever the case, it’s worth knowing what else is out there. In this post, we’ll walk through five strong alternatives to SpiceDB, explore what makes each one different, and help you find the right tool for your approach to authorization.
SpiceDB offers a robust solution for complex authorization, especially when relationship-based access control (ReBAC) is essential. But depending on your team’s architecture, skill set, and needs, it might not be the most efficient or intuitive choice. Here are several reasons why teams consider other options:
SpiceDB is powerful, but it isn't lightweight. Running it typically means managing a custom schema, syncing relationships into a dedicated datastore, and integrating it as a separate microservice. For smaller teams or simpler applications, that operational cost may outweigh the benefits.
The Zanzibar-inspired model can be difficult to grasp if you're not already familiar with graph-based permission systems. For teams used to writing straightforward access rules or policies in code, SpiceDB can feel unintuitive and harder to debug.
SpiceDB excels at ReBAC, but not every system needs relationship graphs. If your app relies more on attribute-based logic (ABAC), time-based permissions, or contextual business rules, other engines may offer better support with less workarounds.
Unlike tools like Oso or Cedar, SpiceDB doesn't provide a policy language for expressing custom logic. While you can define complex permissions through relationships, you can’t easily write conditional rules like “only allow this if the user is the owner and the document is in draft.”
SpiceDB is infrastructure-first. It offers strong APIs and performance, but lacks built-in tooling like UI dashboards, visual editors, or audit trails. If your team is building a product that's meant to be administered by business users, you may need to build those layers yourself—or opt for a tool like Permit.io that includes them.
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Oso is a developer-first authorization framework that lets you define access control logic directly in your application using a declarative policy language called Polar. Your authorization logic is separated from your business logic, making authorization easier to reason about, debug, and test as part of your normal development flow.
Oso is designed to handle a wide variety of access control patterns, from simple role-based rules to more complex setups like attribute-based (ABAC) or relationship-based access control (ReBAC). It also includes thoughtful developer tooling like policy unit testing and decision tracing. While it doesn’t provide a built-in relationship graph like SpiceDB, Oso gives you the flexibility to model these patterns yourself.
Why Oso is a strong alternative to SpiceDB
You've pretty much nailed it. I think it's mostly about preference and what someone finds more intuitive. Polar really is Oso's main distinguishing factor. It's the most general-purpose approach to authorization that I've seen in any of these services. It lets you model just about any authorization logic pretty naturally. And in the case of spicedb, you also have the data store to manage. AuthZed does provide a managed spicedb as well, but then you lose all the open source benefit. And spicedb does also have a schema language to learn - it's just more limited since it's so focused on relations.
Why Oso is better than SpiceDB:
What is Oso’s Pricing?
Oso offers pricing tiers to support teams at different stages. The Developer-tier is completely free, while the Startup-tier starts at $149/month. For growing or larger companies, Oso provides custom pricing, which can include migration support and tailored onboarding services.
Cedar is an open-source, purpose-built policy language developed by AWS to power fine-grained authorization in services like Amazon Verified Permissions and AWS Verified Access. It’s designed to be fast, expressive, and secure by default, and focuses on enabling declarative, attribute-based access control (ABAC) and role-based models in cloud-native applications.
Cedar policies are written in a simple JSON-like syntax, and the language is built to be auditable and analyzable — ideal for environments that prioritize clarity and security in access control. Amazon Verified Permissions (which runs on Cedar) allows you to store and evaluate policies at scale as part of a managed service, but you can also run Cedar standalone in your own stack using the open-source library.
For teams already using AWS infrastructure, Cedar is especially appealing. It’s tightly integrated with AWS services and designed to work seamlessly in cloud-native environments. If you’re building serverless apps or microservices in AWS, Cedar offers a native way to implement fine-grained authorization without introducing external complexity.
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Pricing:
While Cedar itself has no standalone pricing, it's used within services like Amazon Verified Permissions, which charges based on the number of authorization requests. There are no upfront costs or minimum fees — you only pay for what you use.
OpenFGA is an open-source authorization system designed for **fine-grained access control.** Like SpiceDB, it's heavily inspired by Google Zanzibar . Originally developed by the team at Auth0 (now part of Okta), OpenFGA provides a simple and scalable way to model and evaluate complex permission relationships across users, roles, and resources.
It uses a declarative modeling language that allows you to define types, relationships, and authorization rules. OpenFGA is stateless and built to scale horizontally, making it a strong choice for large, distributed systems. You can self-host it or use the hosted version via Auth0 Fine-Grained Authorization.
OpenFGA is arguably the closest architectural alternative to SpiceDB on this list. Both tools are inspired by Google Zanzibar and both are built around relationship-based access control (ReBAC), schema definitions, and high-performance permission checks. The key difference lies in execution: OpenFGA aims to be more approachable, easier to integrate, and slightly more opinionated in how you model access logic.
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OpenFGA is open-source meaning there are no licensing costs, however, there may be significant operational costs.
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Permit.io is a full-featured authorization platform that builds on top of policy engines like OPA (Open Policy Agent) to deliver a low-code, developer-friendly experience. It combines the flexibility of policy-as-code with visual tools and APIs that make it easy to manage roles, permissions, and access flows — all without needing to build those layers yourself.
At its core, Permit.io lets you define policies using OPA's Rego language but wraps that in a more approachable interface. It includes built-in tools for role management, user-to-resource mapping, policy versioning, audit logs, and more — making it especially useful for teams who need robust authorization.
If your team wants to move fast without getting deep into graph modeling or managing your own infrastructure, Permit.io offers a more elevated experience. It's ideal for SaaS teams who need multi-tenant access control, role delegation, or admin-facing permission interfaces — all of which would require additional development effort if you were using SpiceDB directly.
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Permit.io offers multiple pricing tiers, starting with a free Community edition. The Startup-tier begins at $5/month for up to 25,000 MAUs and 100 tenants, while the Pro tier starts at $25/month and supports up to 50,000 MAUs and 20,000 tenants.
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Cerbos is an open-source authorization engine built for modern applications that want to decouple access control from application logic. Instead of embedding authorization rules directly in your code or relying on a relationship graph like SpiceDB, Cerbos lets you define policies in YAML and evaluate them via a lightweight service or SDK.
Cerbos focuses on attribute-based access control (ABAC) and role-based access control (RBAC) out of the box. It’s designed to be simple to adopt, easy to scale, and highly portable across environments — whether you’re building a monolith, microservices, or serverless functions.
With Cerbos, you don’t need to manage a specialized datastore or relationship graph. You define your policies declaratively, then pass user and resource attributes at runtime to get a decision back. This makes Cerbos easy to integrate, especially when you want to keep your data models and access logic loosely coupled.
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Cerbos offers several plans, starting with a free, open-source version. Cerbos Hub starts at $0/month for up to 100 monthly active principals, while the Growth-tier begins at $25/month, with pricing based on active usage.
Authorization is a critical part of any application — it protects your data, controls access, and ensures the right users can do the right things at the right time. SpiceDB is a powerful choice for teams needing sophisticated, relationship-based access control, and it has proven itself in demanding production environments.
That said, no single tool is perfect for every situation. SpiceDB’s complexity and operational requirements might not be the best fit for every team or project. Exploring alternatives can uncover solutions that better match your app’s scale, your team’s workflow, and your architecture.
