8 Best authzed Alternatives & Competitors (2026)

Permit.io provides a no-code policy editor and SDKs for ABAC and ReBAC. It emphasizes quick UI-based policy creation and integrates with many identity providers. Compared with AuthZed it offers simpler onboarding for non-engineers but lacks the same strong-consistency guarantees and AI-specific RAG tooling that AuthZed ships with SpiceDB.

Cerbos is an open-source, self-hosted authorization engine focused on decoupled policy decisions over APIs. It excels in GitOps policy workflows and lightweight deployment. Versus AuthZed it provides full control and zero cloud dependency but requires more operational effort to reach the global scale and managed consistency AuthZed delivers out of the box.

Ory Keto implements Google Zanzibar-style relationships as an open-source service within the Ory stack. It is strong for identity-centric use cases. AuthZed offers a more complete managed cloud experience, AI authorization examples, and higher-level features such as customer-managed permissions that Ory Keto leaves to additional integration work.

OPA is a general-purpose policy engine using Rego for any domain including Kubernetes and microservices. It is extremely flexible yet requires writing low-level policies. AuthZed abstracts common authorization patterns with a higher-level schema language and provides enterprise ReBAC features plus AI retrieval support that OPA does not target natively.

Aserto combines directory, decision logs, and policy-as-code for fine-grained authorization. It targets B2B SaaS teams. Compared with AuthZed it provides similar directory features but fewer built-in AI patterns and less emphasis on global low-latency performance at the scale AuthZed advertises for LLM workloads.

FusionAuth is a self-hosted identity and access management platform with basic role-based checks. It covers login plus simple authorization. AuthZed specializes in advanced relationship-based permissions and AI-aware enforcement, areas where FusionAuth requires significant custom development.

Descope focuses on authentication flows with added authorization via workflows and connectors. It is developer-friendly for adding auth quickly. AuthZed is purpose-built for complex ongoing authorization rather than auth onboarding, offering deeper ReBAC modeling and consistency that Descope does not match.