What are Laravel policies and how do they differ from gates?

Policies handle authorization logic for specific models, while gates define general authorization rules.

Laravel authorization is split into gates and policies. Gates are simple closures used for general checks like 'is admin'. Policies are classes tied to models and organize authorization logic per resource (e.g., PostPolicy for Post model). Policies scale better in large applications because they group related rules and integrate cleanly with Eloquent models.