Our take
Pick Cerbos if app teams who will run the OSS PDP at $0 from disk or git, or start Hub PoC at $0/month (100 MAPs, 2 developers, 5 builds/week) and land on Development from $25/month when they need managed bundle distribution and a 3-month trial. Pick Permit if saaS teams who will stay on Community at $0 (1,000 MAUs, 20 tenants) while they open a first Audit Log, then talk to Permit when they need unlimited MAUs,
hosted authorization desk
Best for
Cerbos Policies you start at $0
Permit Who-can-do-what you start at $0
Free plan
Cerbos $0 · , “Free forever.” YAML policies, audit logs, CI/CD & IDE tooling, Git/Disk/Cloud/DB storage. Community support. Run the PDP in your environment
Permit $0 · 1,000 MAUs. 20 tenants. No limit on authorization queries. 25 roles. 50 resource types. 5 condition sets. 2,000 role assignments / resource instances / relationship tuples. 20 groups. 3 environments. Unlimited projects. RBAC / ABAC / ReBAC / PBAC, Policy UI, Cloud Console, unlimited PDPs, single region. Basic Slack support
Lowest paid
Cerbos Production (Hub) $933/mo
Permit Not published by the vendor
Runs where
Cerbos
Permit Hosted
Watch out
Cerbos Hub “from $25” / “from $933” is MAP-metered
Permit Free is 1,000 MAUs and 20 tenants
Last checked
Cerbos 2026-10-22 · cerbos.dev/pricing
Permit 2026-10-23 · permit.io/pricing
app teams who will run the OSS PDP at $0 from disk or git, or start Hub PoC at $0/month (100 MAPs, 2 developers, 5 builds/week) and land on Development from $25/month when they need managed bundle distribution and a 3-month trial.
Read the Cerbos pagesaaS teams who will stay on Community at $0 (1,000 MAUs, 20 tenants) while they open a first Audit Log, then talk to Permit when they need unlimited MAUs, on-prem, or a 99.99% SLA — because the public page does not print a self-serve paid dollar.
Read the Permit page