head to head · open source
Cap vs Cerbos
Cap has 8,236 GitHub stars, 637 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Cerbos has 4,643 stars, 219 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cap leads on adoption by 77% (8,236 vs 4,643 stars). Cap is written in JavaScript under a custom or non-standard licence; Cerbos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Cap has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Cerbos 5%. Cerbos was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Cap | Cerbos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.2K | ★ 4.6K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-29 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 637 | ⑂ 219 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Cap if
- You weight community size — 8.2K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Cerbos if
- You want the Cerbos feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Cerbos fits your workflow better
About Cap
Cap Cap is a lightweight, modern open source CAPTCHA alternative using proof of work and instrumentation challenges . It's fast, private, and extremely simple to integrate. Documentation Read the docs , try the demo or deploy on Railway What is Cap? Cap replaces visual captchas with modern, accessible and privacy preserving challenges. No images, no tracking, no dependencies, works everywhere. The default way to use Cap is with the Standalone Docker container. Learn more about how Cap works Why Cap? 250x smaller than hCaptcha 20kb, zero dependencies, loads in milliseconds Privacy first Cap doesn't send any…
About Cerbos
What is Cerbos? Cerbos is an authorization layer that evolves with your product. It enables you to define powerful, context aware access control rules for your application resources in simple, intuitive YAML policies; managed and deployed via your Git ops infrastructure. It provides highly available APIs to make simple requests to evaluate policies and make dynamic access decisions for your application. This repo has everything you need to set up a self hosted Cerbos Policy Decision Point (PDP). Sign up for a free Cerbos Hub account to streamline your policy authoring and distribution workflow to self hosted…
read the full Cerbos overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cap or Cerbos more popular?
Cap has 8,236 GitHub stars and Cerbos has 4,643. Cap has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cap and Cerbos free?
Both are open source. Cap has no licence declared in this registry, and Cerbos is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Cap and Cerbos?
Cap is written in JavaScript and Cerbos in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Cap or Cerbos?
Choose Cap if you want the larger community (8,236 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Cerbos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.