Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Cerbos VS Okta

Compare Cerbos VS Okta and see what are their differences

Cerbos logo Cerbos

Cerbos helps teams separate their authorization process from their core application code, making their authorization system more scalable, more secure and easier to change as the application evolves.

Okta logo Okta

Enterprise-grade identity management for all your apps, users & devices
  • Cerbos Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-21

Cerbos is a self-hosted, open source authorization layer that separates your authZ logic from your core application code.

Cerbos allows for swift and secure set up and modification of complex roles and permissions. Unlike traditional methods that require intricate code manipulation, Cerbos simplifies the process by making changes through configuration. This reduces risks associated with authZ changes, such as downtime or security incidents.

Cerbos' structure, independent from the app code, allows both business stakeholders and non-expert engineers to understand the permissions structure. A broader range of stakeholders can make changes to the authZ logic without needing extensive coding knowledge or risking the stability of the core application.

In an era where authZ logic is business logic, the ability to quickly adapt and scale this element is vital. Cerbos makes this possible, facilitating an agile response to new markets and customer needs while maintaining a mature product.

  • Okta Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-11

Cerbos videos

Cerbos - How It Works - Intro

Okta videos

Okta | What Does Okta Do?

More videos:

  • Review - Okta | What Is Okta?
  • Review - Okta User Experience

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Cerbos and Okta)
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Identity And Access Management
Security
100 100%
0% 0
Identity Provider
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Cerbos and Okta.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Cerbos's answer

  • Go
  • Protobuf
  • gRPC
  • CEL

What makes your product unique?

Cerbos's answer

Cerbos stands out in the crowded authorization landscape due to its innovative approach to managing roles and permissions. Unlike traditional systems that embed authorization logic within an application's core code, Cerbos introduces a standalone, self-hosted, stateless service, transforming intricate coding tasks into simpler configurations. This separation not only streamlines the authorization process but also reduces potential security risks and system bottlenecks.

Being open-source, Cerbos fosters a strong community backing, ensuring its evolution aligns with real-world developer needs. Its adaptability is evident in its support for multiple SDKs, YAML configuration, and dynamic context handling, which cater to a wide range of environments and use-cases. This flexibility is further enhanced by Cerbos Cloud, a premium solution offering advanced policy management tools.

Furthermore, Cerbos emphasizes transparency, allowing both technical and non-technical stakeholders to understand and modify the permissions structure. This democratization of authorization logic management reduces reliance on specialized coding expertise. Additionally, its commitment to robust security features, including audit logging and risk mitigation, ensures that businesses can trust Cerbos to safeguard their authorization processes.

In essence, Cerbos' unique blend of innovation, adaptability, community support, and security focus reshapes the way businesses approach and manage authorization, making it a game-changer in the field.

How would you describe your primary audience?

Cerbos's answer

Cerbos' primary audience is best described as forward-thinking engineering leaders at the helm of emerging startups, particularly within the FinTech and Software Development sectors. These leaders typically oversee small to medium-sized teams, with 5-20 engineers, in companies that have a workforce ranging from 0 to 100 employees. Their technological stack prominently features Kubernetes (k8s), indicating a modern and scalable infrastructure.

Financially, these companies are in their early growth stages, having secured funding between 0 to 10 million dollars, primarily in the Seed to Series A range. This suggests that they are in a phase of rapid expansion and are actively seeking solutions that can seamlessly scale with their growth.

The primary objectives of Cerbos’ users revolve around finding a reliable solution to their authorization challenges, ensuring that the chosen solution can be implemented without disruptions, and that it scales effortlessly as the company grows. In essence, the Cerbos champion is a visionary engineering leader, keen on adopting innovative solutions that align with their company's rapid growth trajectory.

What's the story behind your product?

Cerbos's answer

Cerbos, co-founded by Emre and Charith, emerged from a vision to revolutionize the way authorization is approached in modern, cloud-native applications. The duo recognized a persistent challenge in software development: the immense time and effort developers invest in crafting and continually updating custom permissions. This repetitive cycle not only consumes valuable time but also diverts attention from the core essence of product development.

Driven by this realization, Emre and Charith embarked on a mission with Cerbos: to make the implementation of access-control as seamless and painless as possible. Their goal was to eliminate the need for repeatedly writing and rewriting custom permissions implementations. Instead, they envisioned a world where developers could channel their energies and creativity into building outstanding products that resonate with and delight their customers.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

Cerbos's answer

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Cerbos's answer

A person should choose Cerbos over its competitors for several compelling reasons:

Innovative Design: Unlike many competitors, Cerbos separates the traditionally embedded authorization logic from the application's core code. This standalone, stateless service simplifies authorization changes, converting intricate coding tasks into straightforward configurations.

Open-Source Flexibility: Cerbos' open-source nature ensures continuous evolution based on real-world feedback. This community-driven approach ensures that the product remains relevant and adaptable to changing needs.

Transparency and Inclusivity: Cerbos' structure allows a broader range of stakeholders, both technical and non-technical, to understand and modify the permissions structure. This democratizes the authorization process, reducing the dependency on specialized coding expertise.

Robust Security: Cerbos places a strong emphasis on security, offering features like audit logging and risk mitigation. This commitment ensures businesses can trust Cerbos to maintain the integrity of their authorization processes.

Flexibility and Control: Cerbos provides complete control over its deployment, scaling, and monitoring. Unlike solutions that are solely cloud-based or hardcoded, Cerbos strikes a balance between flexibility, control, and security.

Clear Value Proposition: Cerbos offers straightforward pricing and a user-friendly approach, contrasting with competitors that may have complex pricing structures or less intuitive systems.

Community and Support: As an open-source project, Cerbos boasts a strong community backing, ensuring users have access to a wealth of knowledge and support.

In summary, Cerbos' unique blend of innovation, flexibility, transparency, and security makes it a superior choice in the authorization landscape.

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Cerbos and Okta

Cerbos Reviews

We have no reviews of Cerbos yet.
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Okta Reviews

Top 10 Best SAML Identity Providers List for SSO (Pros and Cons)
Okta is one of the popular cloud solutions that allow SSO vendors to easily access cloud and on site applications via any device, from anywhere at any time with the use of robust security policies. Able to directly integrate with 4000+ applications and also existing directories and identity solutions a company uses. Primarily integrates every service that offers SAML.
12 User Authentication Platforms [Auth0, Firebase Alternatives]
Okta is again a flagbearer of password-less security. However, you can ask for the strongest passwords with Okta as well.
Source: geekflare.com
Top 11 Identity & Access Management Tools
Okta is a development tool for backend user identity and a workforce management solution. It is a flexible system that aims to be a one-stop solution for all IAM needs. Currently, Okta falls short on passwordless solutions, prompting users to change their passwords often. In addition, users also report some technical issues with logins.
Source: spectralops.io
Best identity access management software 2022
Okta enables organizations to secure and manage their extended enterprise, whether on-premises or in a private, public or hybrid cloud. With more than 6,000 pre-built integrations to applications and infrastructure providers, Okta claims that its customers can securely adopt the technologies they need to fulfil their missions. Okta provides SSO (single sign-on), MFA...
Source: www.zdnet.com
10 Best Auth0 Alternatives and Similar Platforms
Okta provides a solution that meets the demands of the IT department, end-users and business leaders, with no lengthy service engagements necessary. You can use Okta to secure cloud and web-based software across the whole organization.

Social recommendations and mentions

Okta might be a bit more popular than Cerbos. We know about 6 links to it since March 2021 and only 5 links to Cerbos. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Cerbos mentions (5)

  • Nuxt authorization: How to implement fine-grained access control
    In this tutorial you will learn how to use Cerbos to add fine-grained access control to any Nuxt web application, simplifying authorization as a result. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 🖌️⚙️ Innovate Like Da Vinci: Blending Art and Science in Software Development
    In my work with Cerbos, I apply the lessons learned from Da Vinci to tackle authorization challenges. Our approach is to create solutions where functionality seamlessly integrates with developer experience. Constantly iterating and viewing the tools through the users' lens, helps ensure that our access control solutions are robust and dev-friendly. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Feedback needed: Cerbos Hub is now in public beta!
    Hello fellow devs! I'm with Cerbos (https://cerbos.dev/), a tool designed to manage who can do what in your software applications. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Show HN: Cerbos Hub – Implement roles and permissions in your app in minutes
    Hello HN! I'm on the DevRel team at Cerbos (https://cerbos.dev/), a tool designed to manage who can do what in your software applications. For a couple of years now, Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) is naming authorization a top 10 API security risk: https://owasp.org/API-Security/editions/2023/en/0x11-t10/ We are thrilled to announce that Cerbos Hub is now in public beta! - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • PHP + Cerbos: Revolutionizing Authorization in Laravel applications
    Learn more at: https://cerbos.dev/. Source: 8 months ago

Okta mentions (6)

  • How to use PassportJS for authentication in NodeJS
    The majority of the codebases I've worked on over the years have always favoured using JSON web-tokens (JWT) or Authentication-as-a-Service platforms (Auth0, Okta etc) for authentication logic. These are indeed excellent choices! however, on smaller projects I find these to always seem to be overkill. Recently I started working on a chrome extension that performs social sign-in using twitter OAuth API and... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Millennials, what confuses you about Gen Z?
    This happened to me three days ago! A new employee had trouble logging into our intranet, which is at OurCompanyName.okta.com. He was going to okta.com. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Access Control System (ACS) Architecture
    Maybe go to okta.com , they have some cool solutions, might give you some ideas. Source: over 2 years ago
  • GameStop knows. DRS 💜
    Okta.com is being used by gamestop to power the login to the creator platform. their favicon is a dark blue circle. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Login with email is now shown as an option?
    The email field is used for domains which have set up Okta, Onelogin, or other specialized identity providers. The login page has to redirect you not just to a single okta.com/onelogin.com/etc authenticator as it does with Google/Microsoft/GitHub, but to the specific OAuth endpoint set up for the specific domain. So it needs to know what domain you're trying to authenticate against so it can redirect you to the... Source: over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Cerbos and Okta, you can also consider the following products

authzed - The platform to store, compute, and validate app permissions

Auth0 - Auth0 is a program for people to get authentication and authorization services for their own business use.

Aserto - Fine-grained, scalable authorization in minutes

OneLogin - On-demand SSO, directory integration, user provisioning and more

Permit.io - Fullstack Authorization as a Service for cloud native applications

Microsoft Azure Active Directory - Azure Active Directory is a comprehensive identity and access management cloud solution that provides a robust set of capabilities to manage users and groups and help secure access to applications including Microsoft online services like Office 365 …