Open Source Styra Alternatives
A curated collection of the 1 best open source alternatives to Styra.
The best open source alternative to Styra is Cerbos. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Styra alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement.
Styra alternatives are mainly Application Security but may also be Identity & Access Management (IAM). Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Styra.
Stateless authorization service that evaluates access rules written as YAML policies, keeping permission logic out of your application code.
Authorization logic tends to spread through an application until nobody can say who is allowed to do what. Cerbos pulls that logic out into YAML policies, authored and deployed through the Git-ops infrastructure you already run, and answers access questions over an API instead.
The model is small enough to hold in your head. A principal, usually a user but equally a service, a bot or another application, attempts an action on a resource, and the policy written for that resource decides the outcome.
The stateless service evaluating those policies is the Policy Decision Point, and it exposes two primary APIs.
- CheckResources: can this principal carry out these actions on this resource.
- PlanResources: which resources of a given kind can this principal access.
- Derived roles: RBAC roles extended dynamically with conditions evaluated against contextual data at runtime.
- Principal policies: per-user overrides for the cases where a resource policy is too broad a brush.
- Query plan adapters: turn a PlanResources response into a query instance for your data layer.
The decision point deploys as a Kubernetes service or sidecar, a systemd service or an AWS Lambda function, reading policies from disk, cloud object stores, Git repositories or supported databases and watching them for changes. SDKs cover the usual languages. Cerbos Hub, a hosted control plane, adds shared authoring playgrounds, fleet-wide policy distribution and embedded bundles for browser and edge deployments.
