CNCF Atlas

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Adoption & Ecosystem ​

Who uses it ​

The repository does not ship an ADOPTERS file, and no verifiable first-party list of named production users could be confirmed. Acquisition and vendor articles mention companies such as P&G, Mastercard, HPE, and Sennder as customers, but these are second-hand sources with no corroboration inside the repository (Source 1), so they are not asserted here as confirmed adopters. The most reliable public signal is the GitHub repository activity below.

Adoption signals ​

Measured on 2026-06-22 via the GitHub API (Source 7):

SignalValue
Stars~5,900
Forks~320
Contributors~78 (including anonymous)
Repository created2022-07-14
Latest tagsv1.7.0, v1.7.1 (June 2026)

Vendor and acquisition material claims larger figures (1.2M+ downloads, ~4.3 billion checks per day, 40+ production deployments), but these are second-hand and not independently verified (Sources 1, 3).

Ecosystem ​

  • APIs over gRPC (port 3478) and REST (port 3476) (README.md:104-110).
  • A schema Playground (playground/) for authoring and testing schemas.
  • Language SDKs under sdk/ and protobuf definitions under proto/base/v1/.
  • Caching via ristretto and, for distributed setups, a consistent-hash gRPC balancer plus the Kubernetes resolver registered at startup (cmd/permify/permify.go:16-17).
  • A product-side "Sync Service" (Debezium/Kafka) for real-time data sync, separate from the core engine.
  • Following the 2025 acquisition, Permify is positioned alongside FusionAuth as the authorization half of a self-hostable AuthN + AuthZ platform (Sources 3, 4).

Alternatives ​

All three below trace back to Zanzibar. The honest split is licensing, datastore breadth, and how much per-request consistency tuning you get.

AlternativeDiffers by
SpiceDB (AuthZed)Apache-2.0; the most Zanzibar-faithful, with ZedToken per-request consistency and support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, CockroachDB, and Spanner (Sources 5, 6)
OpenFGA (Auth0/Okta)Apache-2.0; a CNCF Sandbox project, widely adopted, with a similar modeling language (Sources 5, 6)
PermifyAGPL-3.0; PostgreSQL-centric (plus in-memory), multi-tenant by design, with native ABAC via attributes and CEL rules and a DSL/Playground developer experience (Sources 5, 6)

Pick Permify when you want RBAC, ReBAC, and ABAC in one schema, are standardized on PostgreSQL, and the AGPL-3.0 license is acceptable. Pick SpiceDB when you need broad datastore choice or finer per-request consistency control. Pick OpenFGA when you want a permissively licensed, CNCF-governed option.