[opensourcedex]

Permify is a free, open source identity & access management (iam) project written in Go and released under AGPL-3.0. It has 5,952 GitHub stars, 323 forks and 75 open issues, and was last pushed 20 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #10 of 11 tracked projects in Identity & Access Management (IAM), with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 4 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

What is Permify?

What it is

Permify is an open-source authorization service for building and managing fine-grained, scalable, and extensible access controls for applications and services. It is inspired by Google's consistent, global authorization system, Zanzibar, and it lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license. The project is categorized under Security & Privacy, specifically Identity & Access Management, and it has been acquired by FusionAuth.

The concrete problem it solves is the cost of building authorization infrastructure from scratch. Permify abstracts authorization logic out of the codebase and application logic so that it can be reasoned about, tested, and debugged as a single entity, rather than being scattered across services. It runs at request time and answers access control checks such as whether a user can view a document or which posts members of a team can edit, returning responses in tens of milliseconds. The stated goal is to get a working authorization system running in minutes to a couple of days instead of spending months building out that piece of infrastructure.

Key capabilities

  • Authorization modeling through Permify's domain-specific Authorization Language, compatible with RBAC, ReBAC, and ABAC.
  • Granular permissions covering resource-specific, hierarchical, and context-aware cases.
  • Centralized and standardized authorization, abstracting access logic away from application code.
  • Tenant isolation, with separate authorization logic and custom permissions per vendor or organization, managed in one place.
  • Runtime access checks served from any application or service, with response times down to 10ms.
  • gRPC API surface, with SDK samples for hands-on integration.
  • A hosted Playground for building authorization logic and testing it against sample data.

Who uses it and how

  • Multi-tenant SaaS platforms that need isolated authorization logic and custom permissions for each vendor or organization.
  • Teams that want to test and debug authorization as a standalone concern rather than as part of application code.
  • Applications requiring resource-specific, hierarchical, or context-aware permissions that outgrow simple role checks.
  • Cloud-native and distributed deployments, indicated by the Kubernetes, gRPC, and cloud-native topics.
  • Developers modeling permissions first in the Playground, then wiring the same logic
project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline
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Exciting news: Permify has been acquired by FusionAuth! 🎉

Permify Blog Post | Official Press Release | FusionAuth Blog Post


Permify logo

Permify - Open Source Fine-Grained Authorization

Implement fine-grained, scalable and extensible access controls within minutes to days instead of months.
Inspired by Google’s consistent, global authorization system, Zanzibar

Permify%2Fpermify | Trendshift

Permify Go Version  Permify Go Report Card  Permify Licence  Permify Discord Channel  Permify Release  Permify Commit Activity  GitHub Workflow Status  Scrutinizer code quality (GitHub/Bitbucket)  Codecov  Gurubase - Ask AI

permify-centralized

What is Permify?

Permify is an open-source authorization service for easily building and managing fine-grained, scalable, and extensible access controls for your applications and services. Inspired by Google’s consistent, global authorization system, Google Zanzibar

Our service makes authorization more secure and adaptable to changing needs, allowing you to get it up and running in just a few minutes to a couple of days—no need to spend months building out entire piece of infrastructure.

It works in run time and can respond to any type of access control checks (can user X view document Y?, which posts can members of team Y edit?, etc.) from any of your apps and services in tens of milliseconds.

With Permify, you can

🧪 Centralize & Standardize Your Authorization: Abstract your authorization logic from your codebase and application logic to easily reason, test, and debug your authorization. Behave your authorization as a sole entity and move faster with in your core development.

🔮 Build Granular Permissions For Any Case You Have: You can create granular (resource-specific, hierarchical, context aware, etc) permissions and policies using Permify's domain specific language that is compatible with RBAC, ReBAC and ABAC.

🔐 Set Authorization For Your Tenants By Default: Set up isolated authorization logic and custom permissions for your vendors/organizations (tenants) and manage them in a single place.

🚀 Scale Your Authorization As You Wish: Achieve lightning-fast response times down to 10ms for access checks with a proven infrastructure inspired by Google Zanzibar.

Getting Started

Permify Cloud vs Self-hosted?

Permify is open-source authorization service and we have a free and self-hosted solution called Permify Community Edition (CE). Here are the differences between Permify managed hosting in the cloud and the Permify CE:

Permify Cloud Permify Community Edition
Infrastructure management Easy and convenient. It takes minutes to start permissions systems deployed on secure Permify infrastructure with a high availability, backups, security and maintenance all done for you by us. We manage everything so you don’t have to worry about anything and can focus on your core development. You do it all yourself. You need to get a server and you need to manage your infrastructure. You are responsible for installation, maintenance, upgrades, server capacity, uptime, backup, security, stability, consistency, latency and so on.
Release schedule Continuously developed and improved with new features and updates multiple times per week. It's a long-term release published four times per year, so the latest features and improvements won’t be immediately available.
Premium features All features available as listed in our pricing plans. Selected premium features, such as observability dashboards and data synchronization are not available as we aim to maintain a protective barrier around our cloud offering.
Deployment regions You can select your preferred region, supported by AWS, GCP, or Azure to deploy your authorization system. Disaster recovery zones are strategically located to replicate data across regions, ensuring rapid recovery and continuous service during any incident. We also provide SLAs to ensure availability and latency. You have full control and can host your instance on any server in any country of your choice. This includes hosting on personal servers or with cloud providers.
Data privacy Permify Cloud is SOC2 and GDPR compliant, ensuring adherence to stringent data protection standards. You can check out our Trust Center for comprehensive insights into our data management, security measures, and compliance practices. Data privacy management is your responsibility. While you have full control over your data, it is up

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is Permify free to use?

Permify is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Permify do?

Build scalable authorization in minutes, not months

What is Permify written in?

Permify is primarily written in Go. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/permify/permify, and it has 5,952 GitHub stars.