SYS:PRODUCT // Compare
An honest look at authorization infrastructure
Every approach to authorization has trade-offs. This page compares InferaDB to the alternatives — what each does well, where each falls short, and which is right for your situation.
Six approaches to authorization
Teams evaluating authorization infrastructure typically consider one of six approaches. Each has genuine strengths and real limitations.
Build in-house
Role tables in your database, custom middleware. Full control, full burden. Works early, breaks at scale. You own the entire problem: graph traversal, caching, consistency, audit trails, tenant isolation. Cost: $900K+/year for a 6-person team.
Policy engines (OPA, Cedar)
Evaluate rules against input data. Strong at policy evaluation — OPA's Rego and Cedar's policy language are well-designed. But they do not store relationships, do not provide consistency guarantees, and do not include audit trails. You still need a data layer.
AuthZed / SpiceDB
Zanzibar-inspired, open source. Strong community and proven at scale — OpenAI is a customer. Resource-based cloud pricing ($2/hr). No cryptographic audit trails. Backed by CockroachDB or PostgreSQL for storage.
Oso
Offers both core authorization (Oso Cloud) and agent permissions posture management. Strong thought leadership and press coverage. Per-seat pricing. Recent focus on AI agent security monitoring alongside their authorization platform.
Permit.io
Built on OPA/OPAL. UI-forward with embeddable authorization components. MAU-based pricing. Broad feature set spanning multiple products: MCP Gateway, App Permissions, Agent Security.
OpenFGA
CNCF incubating project. Free, open source, and used by Docker and Grafana. No managed service, no audit trails, no encryption at rest. You operate the infrastructure yourself.
What no alternative delivers
InferaDB is not a better version of the same approach. It is a different architecture — purpose-built from storage engine to API layer for one job. InferaDB is currently in early access — join the waitlist for priority onboarding, launch-day pricing, and direct engineering support.
Purpose-built storage engine
Custom B+ tree optimized for relationship graph traversal. Not Postgres, not CockroachDB, not Spanner underneath. 2.8µs p99 reads. The storage layer is the product.
Cryptographic audit trails
Hash-chained, Merkle-verified, independently auditable. Not just logging — proof. Every permission decision is tamper-evident and verifiable by third parties.
Per-vault encryption
Each tenant's data encrypted with its own AES-256-GCM key. Isolation at the storage layer, not the application layer. A compromised node cannot leak cross-tenant data.
Seven compliance frameworks
SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, NIS2, DORA, EU AI Act — mapped by architecture, not bolt-on reporting. The system is designed to produce the evidence auditors need.
How every approach compares
Nine dimensions that matter when choosing authorization infrastructure. We have marked competitor strengths where they genuinely lead.
| Dimension | Built In-House | OPA / Cedar | AuthZedSpiceDB | Oso | Permit.io | InferaDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Months | Weeks | Days | Days | Days | Minutes |
| Check latency | Varies | 1-10 ms | 5-10 ms | Varies | Sub-50 ms | ~3 µs |
| Relationship storage | DIY | None | Built-in | Built-in | Built-in | Purpose-built |
| Audit trail | DIY | Decision logs | Logging | Session logs | Audit logs | Cryptographic proof |
| Tenant isolation | DIY | Not built-in | Namespace | N/A | Namespace | Per-vault encryption |
| Compliance mapping | Manual | None | Partial | Partial | SOC 2, HIPAA | 7 frameworks |
| AI agent support | DIY | Policy-only | Check API | Agent monitoring | MCP Gateway | Delegation modeling |
| Pricing | $900K+/year | Free + infra | $2/hr | $15/seat/mo | $5/MAU/mo | From $0 |
| Open source | N/A | Yes | Yes (SpiceDB) | Partial | Yes (OPAL) | Yes (core) |
Every approach has trade-offs. The question is which trade-offs you can live with.
See if InferaDB is right for your stack.
Nine dimensions compared honestly.
No vendor lock-in on the core engine.
Free tier to prove it works before you commit.