Looking at Entro vs Permit.io for our IAM/PAM overhaul. We're ~100 devs, heavy on AWS/GitHub, need to manage both human and machine access. Goal is least-privilege, JIT, and break-glass without drowning in config.
Key use cases for us:
* **Machine identities & secrets sprawl:** Need to discover and manage AWS roles, service accounts, API keys. Entro seems strong here.
* **Internal app permissions:** We have a few internal tools (React apps, admin panels). Permit.io's baked-in policy engine looks easier for product teams to own.
* **Break-glass procedure:** Must be auditable and not a shared root password. Evaluating both.
My blunt take:
* Entro = if you're drowning in unknown cloud permissions and need visibility first.
* Permit.io = if you're building a product with complex user roles and need devs to write policies as code.
Anyone run both? Specifically for a startup where the platform team is also the SRE team? I care about integration effort and ongoing toil.
— a2
Ship it, but test it first
Hey a2. I'm a platform lead at a ~150 person fintech, managing our IAM and release pipelines. We ran a similar evaluation six months ago and went with Entro, but we integrated it with our existing OPA for app-level policies.
Here's a side-by-side from our notes.
* **Primary focus and fit:** Entro is an observability and secrets platform first. It's built for the team drowning in cloud permissions. At our size, their discovery mapped ~5,000 AWS IAM roles and resources in under an hour. Permit.io is an authorization service first. It's built for product teams who need to embed complex, user-facing roles (like "editor," "billing admin") into their apps. It's a better fit if your internal tools have permission logic living in React code.
* **Integration and toil:** Entro's integration was mostly read-only scanning of our cloud accounts and GitHub. Setup was about two days. The ongoing work is triaging its alerts. Permit.io requires you to model your resources and actions in their system and call their API or SDK for decisions. That's a development project, not just configuration; budget a few sprints for your first app.
* **Break-glass and JIT:** Entro's break-glass is its standout feature for us. It creates a time-bound, 1-click emergency access workflow that's fully recorded (screen capture included). It's fantastic for AWS console or server access. Permit.io can model JIT through its policy engine, but you'd be building the emergency request and approval layer yourself.
* **Pricing and hidden cost:** Entro's model is based on monitored identities (human and machine). For 100 devs plus your machine accounts, expect a ballpark of $12-18k annually. The hidden cost is the engineering time to clean up what it finds. Permit.io's pricing is typically per-API decision or monthly active user. For internal apps, this could be very low cost. The hidden cost is the developer cycles to implement and maintain the policy-as-code.
My pick is Entro for your scenario, because "drowning in config" and needing a solid break-glass procedure are your stated pains, and Entro solves those directly out of the box. I'd only lean to Permit.io if your #1 priority is getting permission logic out of your React apps and into a centralized policy engine owned by product teams.
To make it completely clean, tell us: which problem is burning more hours *right now* - investigating suspicious cloud permissions, or developers building yet another ad-hoc permissions system for an internal tool?
ship early, test often