What Open Policy Agent does

Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open-source, general-purpose policy engine stewarded by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Graduated project and maintained by community contributors under the Apache License 2.0. OPA provides a high-level declarative policy language called Rego, purpose-built for expressing policies over complex hierarchical data structures, and evaluates queries against pre-loaded in-memory data to deliver fast policy decisions. The engine accepts arbitrary structured data as input and can generate arbitrary structured data as output, going beyond simple allow/deny decisions to support context-aware policy enforcement. Native integrations span Envoy External Authorization, Kubernetes admission control (via the OPA Gatekeeper sub-project), CI/CD pipelines, Terraform plan validation, AWS CloudFormation Hooks, Kafka, Docker, GraphQL, HTTP APIs, SSH/sudo, and AI agent tool-calling governance, with developer access through a Go SDK, a REST API, and an interactive Rego Playground.

The OPA ecosystem includes OPA Gatekeeper (Kubernetes admission controller), Regal (Rego linter and analysis tool), and Conftest (configuration testing utility). Distribution is entirely self-serve via downloadable binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows, Docker Hub, Homebrew, and community-maintained packages across Arch Linux, NixOS, Wolfi, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. Marketing and adoption run through community-led channels: documentation portal, Slack community, GitHub repository, KubeCon Maintainer Track sessions, and an official blog. The project does not sell software or charge licensing fees; commercial support is offered by independent third-party providers (including Policy-as-Code Laboratories and DepKeep), and monetization adjacent to OPA occurs through partner products such as Harness Policy as Code (powered by OPA).

Adopters named in public materials span financial services (Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, Capital One, BNY Mellon, BankData, Intuit), technology (Atlassian, Cisco, Pinterest, SugarCRM), insurance (Allstate), professional services (Marsh McLennan), telecommunications (T-Mobile, Vodafone), retail (Zalando), and travel (Tripadvisor). OPA serves platform and DevOps teams, Kubernetes operators, CI/CD engineers, API gateway owners, application developers, and increasingly AI/ML platform teams that need fine-grained governance over autonomous agents. The organization operates with a 1-10 person maintainer team based in San Francisco, has no venture funding, and is structurally a non-profit community project rather than a revenue-generating company.

Name

Open Policy Agent

Legal name

Open Policy Agent contributors

Website

https://openpolicyagent.org

Company type

Private

Founded year

2016

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Open Policy Agent is an open-source CNCF Graduated policy engine that uses the Rego declarative language to unify policy enforcement across Kubernetes, CI/CD, API gateways, and AI agents for enterprise platform, security, and DevOps teams.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Policy-as-Code Engine

NAICS

Software Publishers (5132)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

Identity Orchestration & Policy (Zero Trust Access, Conditional Access) (HDADAAAL)

akta.pro secondary industry

Access Management & Policy Enforcement (Zero Trust) (BPAMAEAH)

Keywords

• Policy as code
• Authorization engine
• Cloud-native governance
• Admission control
• Policy decision engine

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Infrastructure

Revenue model

1. Open Source Distribution: OPA is distributed as open source under Apache License 2.0. No direct revenue from software licensing. The project is maintained by the open source community and supported by third-party commercial providers.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a general-purpose, open-source policy engine that unifies policy enforcement across the technology stack via the Rego declarative policy language. It allows software, platform, and security teams to decouple policy decision-making from application code by querying OPA through REST APIs, the Go SDK, or native integrations such as Envoy and Kubernetes. The project also ships ecosystem tooling including OPA Gatekeeper (Kubernetes admission control), Conftest (configuration testing), and Regal (Rego linting), all distributed under Apache License 2.0.

Product overview

Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a general-purpose policy engine that provides unified policy enforcement across the technology stack. The core product is the OPA policy engine itself, which uses the Rego declarative language for expressing policies. The ecosystem includes the Rego Playground for interactive policy development, OPA Gatekeeper for Kubernetes admission control, Regal for policy linting, and Conftest for configuration testing. Developers can integrate OPA via the Go SDK, REST API, or Envoy native integration. OPA is designed to decouple policy decision-making from application logic, enabling security teams to centrally manage policies while applications query OPA for authorization decisions.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• OPA Gatekeeper: A sub-project for Kubernetes policy enforcement using OPA
• Regal
• Conftest

Products and services

• Open Policy Agent (OPA) A general-purpose, open-source policy engine that unifies policy enforcement across the stack, providing a high-level declarative language (Rego) for specifying policies and APIs to offload policy decision-making from application code. Targeted at platform, security, and application teams in enterprises.
• Rego Playground An interactive online environment where developers can write and test Rego policies against sample input data and see real-time evaluation results, usable without local installation.
• OPA Gatekeeper A sub-project that integrates OPA as a Kubernetes admission controller, enabling custom policy enforcement on cluster resources through declarative Rego policies.
• Regal A linter and analysis tool for Rego that helps developers write higher-quality policy code by enforcing style and correctness rules.
• Conftest A utility for writing tests against structured configuration files using the Rego policy language, enabling policy-as-code testing of configuration artifacts.
• OPA Go SDK A Go library that allows OPA to be embedded inside Go programs as a library, enabling in-process policy evaluation without a separate network call.
• OPA REST API An HTTP API exposing OPA policy decisions to any language or system over standard web requests, enabling cross-stack integration.

Quantifiable outcome

• Comprehensive audit trails generated for every policy decision
• +1 more outcomes

Named customers16 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles5 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration11 records

AI capability3 records

Feature6 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• HarnessnotableTechnology or IntegrationHarness released 'Harness Policy as Code' powered by Open Policy Agent, enabling enterprises to define and enforce compliance and security policies across CI, CD, and Feature Flags pipelines with automatic policy enforcement and audit trails for regulated industries (SOC2, PCI, FedRamp).

Scale indicators1 record

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Direct peers

• Cerbos: Open-source authorization layer for application permissions, providing policy decision and enforcement services analogous to OPA for microservices and API authorization.
• Kyverno: Kubernetes-native policy engine that competes directly with OPA Gatekeeper, using a simpler YAML-based policy style for cluster admission control and configuration validation.
• Styra: Commercial venture founded by the original creators of OPA, providing enterprise products (including enterprise OPA distributions and Dashboards) that wrap and operationalize OPA for production authorization use cases.
• HashiCorp Sentinel: Policy-as-code framework embedded in HashiCorp Terraform and other products, offering a competing declarative policy language for infrastructure and application authorization decisions.
• Casbin: General-purpose open-source authorization library and policy engine that, like OPA, decouples policy from application code and supports multiple model formats for access control.
• AWS Cedar: AWS-developed policy language and evaluation engine for authorization, positioned as a cloud-native alternative to OPA for permissions and policy decision-making.

Emerging players

• Kubewarden: Kubernetes policy engine leveraging WebAssembly for policy execution; competes with OPA Gatekeeper specifically on admission control and cluster admission workflows.

Broad incumbents

• AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management): Hyperscaler-scale identity and policy service from AWS that addresses authorization use cases overlapping with OPA, especially for cloud-native workloads and externalized authorization via Cedar.
• Google Cloud IAM: Cloud-provider identity and access management suite with policy components that overlap with OPA's authorization and access enforcement capabilities for Google Cloud workloads.
• Microsoft Azure Policy: Microsoft's governance service for enforcing organizational standards and policies on Azure resources, offering an integrated alternative to OPA-style external policy engines.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• GitHubgithub.com/open-policy-agent
• Xx.com/openpolicyagent
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/open-policy-agent

Compliance1 record

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Open Policy Agent