head to head · open source
Unleash vs Cerbos
Unleash has 13,924 GitHub stars, 919 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cerbos has 4,643 stars, 219 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Unleash leads on adoption by 200% (13,924 vs 4,643 stars). Unleash is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Cerbos is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Unleash has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, Cerbos 5%. Unleash 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Unleash | Cerbos | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 4.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 919 | ⑂ 219 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Unleash if
- You weight community size — 14K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 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 Unleash
Launch the live demo Try Unleash Enterprise for free What is Unleash? Unleash is a powerful open source solution for feature management. It streamlines your development workflow, accelerates software delivery, and empowers teams to control how and when they roll out new features to end users. With Unleash, you can deploy code to production in smaller, more manageable releases at your own pace. Feature flags in Unleash let you test your code with real production data, reducing the risk of negatively impacting your users' experience. It also enables your team to work on multiple features simultaneously without the…
read the full Unleash 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 →
More in Security & Privacy
Related comparisons
More Application Security projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Application Security field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Unleash or Cerbos more popular?
Unleash has 13,924 GitHub stars and Cerbos has 4,643. Unleash has the larger community by that measure.
Are Unleash and Cerbos free?
Both are open source. Unleash is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Cerbos under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Unleash and Cerbos?
Unleash 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, Unleash or Cerbos?
Choose Unleash if you want the larger community (13,924 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Cerbos if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.