OPA (Open Policy Agent) is a powerful, general-purpose policy evaluation engine. Kynara is a complete control plane purpose-built for AI agents — built on the same policy-evaluation pattern, but with the identity, delegation, approval, and audit machinery agents need.
| Capability | Kynara | OPA |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | AI-agent permission & governance control plane | Policy evaluation engine + library (Rego) |
| Purpose-built for AI agents | ✓ Yes | ✗ General-purpose |
| Manages agent & user identities | ✓ Yes | ✗ Bring your own data/identities |
| RBAC + ABAC policy engine | ✓ Yes | ~ ABAC via Rego; RBAC you model yourself |
| Non-escalation (agent ≤ dispatching user) | ✓ Yes | ✗ Not a built-in concept |
| Human-in-the-loop approvals | ✓ Yes | ✗ Build it yourself |
| MCP tool-call authorization | ✓ Yes | ✗ Not built-in |
| Tamper-evident (hash-chained) audit log | ✓ Yes | ✗ Decision logs, not hash-chained by default |
| Policy replay / simulation | ✓ Yes | ~ Test framework; no historical replay |
| Deployment | Cloud or self-host (source-available) | Self-host (sidecar/library) |
Comparison reflects our reading of publicly documented capabilities and is provided in good faith; verify current specifics with each vendor.
You need a flexible, embeddable policy engine and you're comfortable writing Rego and supplying your own data, identity model, audit, and workflows. OPA is excellent infrastructure for app-level authorization across many use cases.
You want an agent-native control plane without assembling it yourself: managed agent/user identities, the non-escalation invariant, human approvals, MCP enforcement, policy replay, and a tamper-evident audit chain — all integrated.
Kynara can complement an OPA-based stack: keep OPA for your application authorization, and use Kynara as the dedicated control plane for what your AI agents are allowed to do at runtime.
Kynara uses the same evaluate-policy-against-context pattern OPA popularized, but adds the full control plane around it — identities, non-escalation, approvals, MCP enforcement, and a tamper-evident audit chain.
Yes. A common pattern is OPA for application/service authorization and Kynara as the runtime control plane for AI agents.
No. Policies are configured through Kynara's policy model and editor; you don't need to learn a policy language to get started.
RBAC + ABAC, human-in-the-loop approvals, MCP tool-call enforcement, and a tamper-evident audit log.