Zanzibar is a paper, not a product. WardenAuth ships ReBAC today.
Google's Zanzibar paper describes one of the most sophisticated authorization systems ever built — serving billions of users across Google's entire product suite at single-digit millisecond latency. But implementing Zanzibar is a months-long engineering project. WardenAuth gives you managed ReBAC (relationship tuples, check/expand APIs, subject sets) alongside RBAC, ABAC, and audit — without building a distributed graph database.
Overview
The Zanzibar paper (2019) describes Google's global authorization system — relationship-based access control at planetary scale. It's an inspiring architecture: a distributed, consistent, low-latency graph database with namespace configuration, relationship tuples, and check/expand APIs.
But implementing Zanzibar is not a weekend project. It requires a distributed consensus database (Spanner-like), namespace configuration language, relationship tuple storage with indexing, watch API for real-time updates, and the check/expand resolution engines. Multiple companies have spent 6-18 months building their own. WardenAuth gives you managed ReBAC as part of a complete authorization platform.
Building Your Own Zanzibar — Strengths
- Full control over the authorization system
- No vendor dependency — you own the implementation
- Can optimize for your specific access patterns
- Google's paper provides clear architecture guidance
- Maximum flexibility in namespace and relationship design
Building Your Own Zanzibar — Limitations
- 6-18 month engineering project, minimum
- Requires distributed systems expertise (consensus, replication, consistency)
- Ongoing maintenance: monitoring, scaling, schema migrations
- Must build management UX, audit, API keys from scratch
- No multi-tenancy out of the box
- Ongoing operational cost: compute, storage, engineering time
- Diverts engineering from product work
Pricing comparison
| Scenario | Building Your Own Zanzibar | WardenAuth |
|---|---|---|
| Initial build (6-18 months) | ~$300K-900K in engineering time | Free to start |
| Ongoing operation | ~$5-15K/mo (compute + 1-2 engineers) | $79-3,499/mo |
| Management dashboard | Must build (weeks to months) | Included |
| Audit trail | Must build | Included |
| API key management | Must build | Included |
Feature comparison
| Feature | Building Your Own Zanzibar | WardenAuth |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship tuples (ReBAC) | ||
| Check / Expand APIs | ||
| Subject sets | ||
| Fine-grained RBAC | Must implement | |
| ABAC / attribute conditions | Must implement | |
| Built-in management dashboard | ||
| Audit trail (40+ events) | ||
| API key management | ||
| Multi-tenant scopes | ||
| SoD / Approval workflows | ||
| Webhooks | ||
| SSO / SCIM | Included (Business+) | |
| Available today | ||
| Flat-rate pricing | Engineering cost |
When each makes sense
Build your own Zanzibar if authorization is your product's core differentiator and you have a dedicated infrastructure team with experience building distributed systems. Companies like Airbnb, Carta, and Notion have done this successfully — but it required significant investment.
Choose WardenAuth if you need relationship-based access control as a feature of your product, not as your product. WardenAuth provides managed ReBAC — relationship tuples, check/expand APIs, and subject sets — alongside RBAC, ABAC, audit, and multi-tenancy, in a flat-rate platform you can integrate in days.
Building your own Zanzibar is the right call if authorization is your core product — like Google, Airbnb, or Carta — and you need complete control. For everyone else, WardenAuth provides managed ReBAC alongside a complete authorization platform. The engineering months you save can build features your customers actually pay for.
See for yourself — no credit card required.