head to head · open source
Infisical vs Cerbos
Infisical has 30,219 GitHub stars, 2,408 forks, 789 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cerbos has 4,643 stars, 219 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Infisical leads on adoption by 551% (30,219 vs 4,643 stars). Infisical is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; Cerbos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Infisical has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Cerbos 5%. Infisical was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (kubernetes), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| Infisical | Cerbos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 4.6K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 219 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Infisical if
- You weight community size — 30K 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 Infisical
The open source secret management platform : Sync secrets/configs across your team/infrastructure and prevent secret leaks. Slack Infisical Cloud Self Hosting Docs Website Twitter Hiring (Remote/SF) Introduction Infisical is the open source security infrastructure platform that teams use for secrets, certificates, and privileged access management. We're on a mission to make security tooling more accessible to everyone, not just security teams, and that means redesigning the entire developer experience from ground up. Features Secrets Management: Centralize your application secrets and configuration across every…
read the full Infisical 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 Infisical or Cerbos more popular?
Infisical has 30,219 GitHub stars and Cerbos has 4,643. Infisical has the larger community by that measure.
Are Infisical and Cerbos free?
Both are open source. Infisical 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 Infisical and Cerbos?
Infisical 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, Infisical or Cerbos?
Choose Infisical if you want the larger community (30,219 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.