These two get compared because both say authorization and both say policy. But they answer different questions. Permit.io answers: may this user do this action inside my application? AgentValet answers: may this agent make this call to an outside platform, and with whose credential? If you are choosing between them, you are probably solving one problem and looking at a tool built for the other.
Permit.io is authorization-as-a-service for the software you build. You model roles and relationships, write policy in a UI or as code, and your application calls a check at each decision point. Done well, it is a clean way to get fine-grained permissions out of your business logic, and for human users inside your own product it is a mature approach with a real team behind it.
The enforcement point, though, is a call your own code chooses to make. If a code path never asks, nothing answers. That is manageable inside an application you wrote, where you control every path. It breaks down for AI agents reaching outward, because an agent holding an API key for an outside platform does not need your permission check to use it. The check is advice the calling code opted into. The key is power the agent already has. AgentValet exists to take that second part away: the agent never holds the platform credential, so the broker's decision is not advice, it is the only route to the platform.
| AgentValet | Permit.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | AI agents calling outside platforms: SaaS APIs, MCP servers, your own services. | Applications authorizing their own users and resources. |
| Enforcement point | The platform call itself. The broker holds the credential and attaches it at call time. | A policy check your application code calls at each decision point. |
| Holds the credentials | ✓ Yes. Envelope-encrypted, decrypted in memory per call, never given to the agent. | ✕ No. Credentials for downstream systems stay wherever your app keeps them. |
| In-app user permissions (RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC) | ✕ Not a feature. AgentValet does not authorize your users inside your product. | ✓ The core product, with a policy UI and SDKs for it. |
| What a bypass looks like | Nothing quiet. An agent without the broker has no credential to call with. | A code path that skips the check, or an agent using a key directly. The policy engine never hears about either. |
| Human approval on risky actions | ✓ The call pauses at the broker; a human approves out-of-band before it executes. | Approval logic is something you build into your app around the check. |
| Audit trail | One append-only row per executed call: agent, platform, action, outcome, and the policy version that decided it. | Decision logs for the checks your application made. |
| Revocation | Revoke an agent and its next call fails closed. No key rotation, because no key was ever distributed. | Remove the role or policy; any directly held credentials still need rotating separately. |
If you are building permissions for the people using your product, use a purpose-built authorization layer, and Permit.io is a strong one. AgentValet will not model your org chart, your resource hierarchy, or your customers' sharing rules, and it is not trying to. Where the boundary sits is simple to state: inside your application, authorization is a design problem, and a policy engine solves it. Outside your application, where an agent is holding power in the form of a credential, authorization is a custody problem, and only holding the credential solves it.
Plenty of teams will run both, a policy engine deciding what users may do in-app, and a credential broker deciding what agents may execute outside it. They meet in the middle without overlapping.
Register one agent on the free tier, grant it one scope, and watch a denied call fail closed with an audit row to show for it. It takes minutes, and there is no card.