Cerbos

Cerbos is an authorization management platform that externalises access control from application code, enforcing fine grained, contextual policy across applications, gateways, workloads and AI agents. Policies are written and versioned separately from the services that consume them, and applications ask Cerbos for a decision rather than implementing rules themselves.

Decoupling authorization is the idea the product rests on and the reason this category exists at all. Access rules written inside application code are duplicated across every service, drift apart as each is changed independently, and cannot be audited without reading the source. Moving them into one policy layer means a rule is defined once, applies everywhere, and can be reviewed by someone who does not read code.

Visibility over access decisions is the second half. Knowing what your rules say is different from knowing what actually happened, and a central decision point produces a log of every allow and deny, which is what turns an access review from an archaeology exercise into a query.

Extending enforcement to AI agents reflects a real shift, because an agent acting on a user's behalf raises the question of whose permissions apply, and answering it consistently requires the same policy layer the applications use. Pricing starts free for evaluation and scales by monthly active principals.