Open-source alternatives to Casbin

Casbin is an authorization library that provides a model-based engine for enforcing access control across diverse application environments. It decouples authorization logic from application code by using a configuration-driven approach, allowing developers to define access rules and evaluation logic independently. The system supports a wide range of access control models, including role-based, attribute-based, and relationship-based patterns, which are evaluated at runtime to determine if a subject is permitted to perform an action on a resource. The project distinguishes itself through a hig

Cerbos is an open-source authorization service that provides a centralized, language-agnostic engine for managing access control. It functions as a policy-as-code platform, allowing teams to define, test, and distribute authorization rules using declarative YAML or JSON configurations. By decoupling access logic from application code, it enables consistent permission enforcement across diverse service stacks. The project distinguishes itself through its ability to translate high-level authorization policies into native database query filters. This capability allows applications to enforce sec

OpenFGA is a fine-grained authorization server and policy decision point that implements relationship-based access control. It serves as a centralized authorization service for evaluating access requests and managing relationship tuples across distributed microservices and multi-tenant environments. The engine combines relationship graphs with attribute-based access control, using the Common Expression Language to evaluate dynamic runtime attributes and conditional access rules. It handles complex hierarchies and nested permissions by traversing chains of associations and parent-child links t

CanCan is an authorization library for Ruby on Rails applications that provides a declarative framework for defining user permissions. It functions as a role-based access control system that decouples security logic from controllers by centralizing all ability definitions in a single location. The library distinguishes itself by translating permission rules into database-driven filters. This allows the system to retrieve only the specific records a user is permitted to see based on attribute conditions and defined scopes, rather than verifying permissions after data has been loaded. The fram

This project is a comprehensive security framework for PHP applications, providing a modular system for verifying user identities and enforcing access control policies. It functions as a security middleware that decouples authentication and authorization logic from core application code, allowing for centralized management of user sessions, credentials, and resource access. The framework distinguishes itself through a highly decoupled architecture that separates identity verification from storage mechanisms. It utilizes a strategy-based approach to authentication, enabling developers to imple

This is a role-based access control system for Laravel applications that manages user permissions and roles within a database. It provides a database permissions manager to assign specific abilities to users and roles, utilizing authorization gates to restrict access to routes and interface elements. The project features a wildcard permission system that uses pattern matching to grant broad access across multiple related permissions. It also supports team-scoped access control, allowing users to maintain different roles and permission levels across separate organizational contexts or teams.

Grav is a flat-file content management system that eliminates the need for a traditional database by storing site content and configuration in human-readable Markdown and YAML files. Built as a modular PHP web framework, it uses a hierarchical page routing system where the physical directory structure directly determines the site's URL paths. The platform is distinguished by its event-driven plugin architecture and a command-line interface that prioritizes system administration, deployment, and maintenance tasks. It utilizes a blueprint-driven system to generate administrative forms from stru

OpenZeppelin Contracts is a library of modular, secure, and reusable smart contract components designed for the development of decentralized applications. It provides a foundational framework for building standard-compliant contracts, offering battle-tested implementations for token standards, access control, and common utility patterns. The project distinguishes itself through its comprehensive support for complex architectural patterns, including proxy-based upgradeability, role-based access control, and account abstraction. It enables developers to implement modular logic injection via hoo

This project is a service mesh platform designed to manage, secure, and observe service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters. It functions as a control plane that orchestrates transparent sidecar proxies, which intercept and manage network traffic to provide reliable connectivity for microservices. By automating the injection of these proxies, the platform ensures that infrastructure-level policies are applied consistently across all workloads without requiring manual configuration changes. The platform distinguishes itself through its focus on zero-trust security and cross-clu

FastMCP is a Python framework designed for building servers that expose functions, resources, and prompts to AI models using the Model Context Protocol. It simplifies the development process by automatically deriving tool metadata, input schemas, and documentation directly from Python function signatures and type hints. The framework provides a unified container for managing these components, allowing developers to build modular applications that integrate seamlessly with AI assistants. The project distinguishes itself through its support for interactive, server-defined user interface compone

Kanidm is a centralized identity management server designed to handle authentication, authorization, and directory services across distributed infrastructure. It provides a comprehensive framework for managing human and service accounts, utilizing a schema-driven database to store identity records, group memberships, and system attributes. The platform supports a wide range of authentication methods, including passkeys, passwords, and standard protocols like OAuth2, OIDC, LDAP, and RADIUS. The system distinguishes itself through a granular access control engine that enforces security policies

Casdoor is a centralized identity and access management platform that functions as an OAuth 2.0 authorization server. It provides a comprehensive suite of services for managing user identities, authentication sessions, and access policies across both web and machine-to-machine applications. Built with a decoupled frontend-backend architecture in Go, the platform supports high-concurrency environments and offers a web-based management interface for administrative tasks. The platform distinguishes itself through its extensive support for federated identity management, allowing integration with

Action Policy is a Ruby authorization framework designed to manage user access and permissions by encapsulating security logic into dedicated policy classes. It provides a structured system for defining access rules that evaluate user actions against specific application resources, ensuring that security logic remains decoupled from the primary application code. The framework distinguishes itself through its ability to handle complex authorization requirements across diverse interfaces, including web controllers and various API formats. It supports dynamic permission evaluation by utilizing a

NestJS Access Control is a role-based and attribute-based authorization framework designed for the NestJS ecosystem. It provides a declarative system for securing application routes and resources, allowing developers to enforce granular access policies through metadata-driven decorators. The framework distinguishes itself by supporting hierarchical role inheritance, which enables the resolution of complex permission sets by traversing parent and child role relationships. It also facilitates dynamic authorization management, allowing security rules to be loaded asynchronously from external dat

Dolibarr is an open-source business suite and integrated PHP web application designed for ERP and CRM management. It serves as a centralized system for tracking company activities, including sales, invoicing, stock, and accounting. The platform combines financial accounting, human resources management, and web-based inventory tracking. It provides tools for managing general ledgers, bank accounts, employee timesheets, and product catalogs alongside manufacturing orders and warehouse stock levels. The software covers a broad range of operational areas, including customer relationship manageme

Kill Bill is a subscription billing platform and usage-based billing engine designed to manage recurring invoicing and automated payment collection. It functions as a multi-tenant billing infrastructure, providing isolated environments for different organizational entities through a dedicated API. The system is distinguished by a plugin-based extension framework that allows for the integration of third-party payment gateways and custom business logic. It includes a payment gateway orchestrator to handle transactions and refunds, as well as a revenue recognition system to allocate contract rev

Presto is a distributed SQL query engine designed for high-performance analytical processing across heterogeneous data sources. It functions as a data federation platform and massively parallel processing engine, allowing users to execute interactive queries against diverse storage systems without requiring data migration. By mapping remote metadata and structures to a unified relational namespace, it enables seamless cross-platform analysis through a standard SQL interface. The engine distinguishes itself through a pluggable connector architecture and a shared-nothing distributed processing

OpenSearch is a distributed search and analytics engine designed for indexing, searching, and analyzing massive volumes of structured and unstructured data in real time. It functions as a comprehensive platform that integrates enterprise-grade search capabilities, a vector database for high-dimensional similarity lookups, and a unified observability suite for monitoring logs, metrics, and traces across complex distributed environments. The platform distinguishes itself through its support for agentic workflow automation, allowing users to orchestrate multi-agent tasks and integrate foundation

Pig is a microservice-based RBAC permission management platform built on Spring Cloud and Spring Boot, with OAuth2 authentication and authorization at its core. It provides a dedicated authorization server that issues access and refresh tokens using authorization code, password, and refresh token grant types, while embedding role and permission checks into each microservice to secure API endpoints. The platform distinguishes itself through a comprehensive set of integrated capabilities, including automatic CRUD code generation from database schemas that produces controller, service, mapper, a

Gravitino is a federated metadata lake and unified data catalog designed to manage tables, files, and AI models across diverse data sources and cloud storage. It serves as a centralized interface for governing schemas, access controls, and tagging across relational databases, messaging queues, and object stores. The project distinguishes itself by unifying the management of AI assets, such as machine learning models and their version lineages, alongside traditional tabular data. It also implements the Iceberg REST specification to provide a standardized metadata server and proxy for lakehouse

Zend Framework is a comprehensive set of decoupled components for building modular, event-driven web applications. It implements an MVC architecture to separate business logic from the user interface and provides a structured request-handling system through a sequential middleware pipeline. The project features a factory-driven dependency injection container to automate object instantiation and manage class lifecycles. It also includes a comprehensive security suite for verifying user identities and restricting resource access using access control lists and role-based access control adapters.

Angular Permission is a framework for managing user access control in single-page applications by verifying roles and permissions against specific application routes and interface components. It functions as a security utility that enforces granular authorization policies, ensuring that sensitive features and data remain accessible only to authorized individuals. The system operates through a centralized registry that serves as the single source of truth for all defined roles and security logic. By utilizing declarative metadata, developers can attach access requirements directly to route def

Security-101 is a vendor-agnostic, foundational cybersecurity learning curriculum organized into modular, framework-aligned modules. It is designed to build core knowledge across multiple security domains without tying content to specific products or platforms, making it suitable for both beginners and professionals seeking a structured introduction to the field. The curriculum is built around established security frameworks, including the MITRE ATT&CK framework for standardized threat analysis and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework for incident response workflows. It covers a broad range of do

RuoYi is a Spring Boot admin framework designed for building enterprise applications. It provides a foundation for creating management dashboards and orchestrating systems using either monolithic or microservices architectures. The project features a low-code application generator that produces ready-to-compile source code and API documentation based on database table configurations. It implements a role-based access control system to map users and roles to specific menus and buttons for secure resource access. The framework includes capabilities for system health monitoring, real-time perfo

ZenML is an extensible machine learning orchestration framework designed to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of data pipelines and AI agent workflows. It functions as a durable orchestrator that executes machine learning tasks as directed acyclic graphs, ensuring that every step is containerized for consistent performance across local, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure. By decoupling pipeline code from underlying compute and storage backends, the platform allows developers to define infrastructure-agnostic stacks that remain portable across diverse environments. The project distinguishes itself

This project is an open-source identity provider and single sign-on platform that centralizes user authentication for multiple web applications and services. It functions as a multi-protocol authentication gateway, verifying user identities and issuing tokens through the CAS protocol as well as industry standards including SAML, OAuth2, and OpenID Connect. The system acts as a federated identity server, allowing authentication to be delegated to external third-party or corporate identity providers. It distinguishes itself through identity attribute governance, which manages which specific use

Authority is an authorization framework for Ruby on Rails applications that manages user permissions and access control policies. It provides a system for encapsulating complex security logic into dedicated classes, separating these concerns from core business models. The library enforces security rules by intercepting web requests at the controller level and validating actions against defined policies. It utilizes convention-based mapping to automatically associate models with their corresponding authorization classes, supporting both global checks and instance-aware validation for specific

This project provides a TypeScript software development kit for the Model Context Protocol, a standard designed to facilitate bidirectional communication between AI applications and external data sources or tools. It serves as a foundational framework for building both clients and servers, enabling language models to interact with external systems through a unified, decoupled interface. The SDK distinguishes itself by implementing a transport-agnostic connection layer that supports both local standard input-output streams and remote HTTP endpoints. It utilizes a JSON-RPC message bus to manage

Pulumi is an infrastructure-as-code framework that enables the definition, deployment, and management of cloud resources using general-purpose programming languages. It functions as a cloud resource orchestrator that coordinates the lifecycle of heterogeneous infrastructure by executing code to construct dependency graphs and reconciling the desired state against actual cloud environments. The platform distinguishes itself through a language-host runtime bridge that allows developers to use standard programming languages to define infrastructure, rather than relying solely on domain-specific

Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps-based continuous delivery tool designed for Kubernetes. It functions as a centralized control plane that synchronizes application states from version-controlled repositories directly into target clusters, ensuring that the live environment consistently matches the desired configuration defined in Git. The platform distinguishes itself through its ability to manage multi-cluster deployments from a single interface, providing unified oversight across distinct computing environments. It employs a controller-based reconciliation loop to continuously monitor for co