Authzed Competitor Insights

Authzed provides a managed, globally distributed authorization service based on Google's Zanzibar paper. Their core offering is a highly scalable and performant permission system that allows developers to define, manage, and enforce fine-grained access control within their applications. Essentially, Authzed offloads the complex challenge of building and maintaining an authorization layer, allowing businesses to focus on their core product. They offer both a hosted cloud service and an open-source engine (SpiceDB) for self-hosting, catering to different operational preferences. Their solution emphasizes developer-friendliness through a declarative language (Schema) for defining relationships, clear APIs, and integrations with popular development stacks. By providing a 'source of truth' for permissions, Authzed aims to simplify security audits, reduce development time, and eliminate the need for custom, often error-prone, authorization logic within applications. They position themselves as an essential infrastructure component for modern, secure, and scalable applications.