head to head · open source
GrowthBook vs Cerbos
GrowthBook has 8,558 GitHub stars, 890 forks, 793 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cerbos has 4,643 stars, 219 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped yesterday. GrowthBook leads on adoption by 84% (8,558 vs 4,643 stars). GrowthBook is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; Cerbos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. GrowthBook has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Cerbos 5%. GrowthBook 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
| GrowthBook | Cerbos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.6K | ★ 4.6K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 890 | ⑂ 219 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick GrowthBook if
- You weight community size — 8.6K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 GrowthBook
Open Source Feature Flags, Experimentation, and Product Analytics Create a free GrowthBook Cloud account to get started quickly. Or run it yourself with: Then visit View the full Self Hosting Instructions for more details. This pulls our prebuilt public Docker image and needs no registry credentials. If you instead build the image from the Dockerfile in this repo, its hardened base images come from Docker's dhi.io registry, which requires a one time docker login dhi.io with any free Docker account — see Building from source. Our Philosophy The top 1% of companies spend thousands of hours building their own in…
read the full GrowthBook overview →
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 GrowthBook or Cerbos more popular?
GrowthBook has 8,558 GitHub stars and Cerbos has 4,643. GrowthBook has the larger community by that measure.
Are GrowthBook and Cerbos free?
Both are open source. GrowthBook 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 GrowthBook and Cerbos?
GrowthBook is written in TypeScript 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, GrowthBook or Cerbos?
Choose GrowthBook if you want the larger community (8,558 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.