Authorization Core vs. Authorization Extension

Understand the differences between Auth0’s core RBAC release and the Authorization Extension.

We plan to deprecate Rules and Hooks in 2024, and at that time, Rules and Hooks-based Extensions will be out of support. We highly recommend that you migrate to Actions to extend Auth0. With Actions, you have access to rich type information, inline documentation, and public npm packages, and can connect external integrations that enhance your overall extensibility experience.

To learn more about what Actions offer, read Understand How Auth0 Actions Work. We also have a dedicated Move to Actions page that highlights feature comparisons, an Actions demo, and other resources to help you on your migration journey.

To read more about the Rules and Hooks deprecation, read our blog post: Preparing for Rules and Hooks End of Life.

Auth0 currently provides two ways of implementing role-based access control (RBAC): our Core implementation and our Authorization Extension. Our Core implementation improves performance and scalability.

We recommend using Authorization Core for most implementations. If you are looking to represent teams, business customers, or partners in a B2B or SaaS application, we recommend representing them as Organizations and using Authorization Core. The Authorization Extension does not have support for Organizations.

To help you decide which feature is right for your implementation, we present the differences between the two:

Feature	Authorization Core	Authorization Extension
Enhanced performance and scalability	Yes - Read Entity Limit Policy	No - Limited to 500KB of data (1000 groups, 3000 users, where each user is a member of 3 groups; or 20 groups, 7000 users, where each user is a member of 3 groups)
Create/edit/delete Roles	Yes	Yes
Roles can contain permissions from one or more APIs	Yes	No
Users and Roles can be assigned to Groups	No	Yes
Roles are attached to specific applications	No	Yes
Create/edit/delete Users	Yes	Yes
Search Users by user, email, connection	Yes	Yes
Search Users by identity provider, login count, last login, phone number	Yes	No
Search Users using Lucene syntax	Yes	No
User import/export via JSON	Not currently	Yes
Create custom authorization policies	Yes	No

Learn more

• Authorization Policies
• Configure Core Authorization Features for Role-Based Access Control
• Entity Limit Policy
• Authorization Extension