Compare

Arcade vs Cerbos

Arcade scores higher on the AgentReady, 61/100 against 46/100. They differ on 8 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Arcade. The runtime between your agents and every system they need to reach.

Cerbos. Authorization management platform for applications, APIs, AI agents, MCP servers, services, and workloads.

Where Arcade is ahead

Arcade passes clear canonical domain, and Cerbos does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: authentication documented. Cerbos misses it.

And on adopt, self-service signup, agent-compatible signup flow, fast time to first request and cli available. Cerbos misses those.

Finally, on operate, agent compatibility verified. Cerbos misses it.

Where Cerbos is ahead

Cerbos passes clear product positioning, and Arcade does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

What neither does

Both fail structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, pricing understandable, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented, no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Cerbos leads 93 to 87. Arcade misses clear product positioning; Cerbos misses clear canonical domain.

Understand. Arcade leads 23 to 15. Arcade misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, pricing understandable, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Cerbos misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, pricing understandable, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented.

Adopt is whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop. Arcade leads 76 to 40. Arcade misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance; Cerbos misses self-service signup, no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, cli available.

Operate. Arcade leads 56 to 35. Arcade misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable; Cerbos misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified.

Pricing

Arcade does not publish a machine-readable starting price. Cerbos does not publish one.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Arcade clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Arcade and Cerbos. Alternatives to each: Arcade, Cerbos.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["arcade", "cerbos"]}