Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Styra / OPA: who runs the policy engine now that Styra has gone quiet?

Open Policy Agent is the best general-purpose policy engine. In open source. We won't pretend otherwise. It graduated from the CNCF in 2021. It runs Kubernetes admission control. At Goldman Sachs and Capital One. Rego can express policy. Most vendor rule builders can't. If you already run OPA, keep it.

But OPA answers one question: is this allowed? It doesn't issue the agent's identity. It doesn't hold its credentials. It doesn't pull its access mid-job. It doesn't keep proof the decision happened. You build that. DataShield ships it. There's a new wrinkle, too. Styra sold the paid layer. That company has in effect wound down. Details below, with sources.

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The short version

Pick DataShield when

You need the whole agent seam, not just the decision. SSO and passkeys, MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings, a Connection Vault for credentials, and a signed audit chain. See how Auth fits together.
An auditor or the EU AI Act's Article 12 will ask you to prove the log wasn't edited. That's the ask. Our chain answers with math. OPA's decision logs are plain JSON. They ship to a service you choose. Run the verifier.
You want to pull an agent's access mid-session. The next checked tool call should fail, not wait for a token to expire.
You'd rather buy the assembly than staff it. A team that wires OPA to their own identity, vault, proof layer. They sign up for a year of platform work. That's real work.

Pick Styra / OPA when

Your policy problem is Kubernetes admission control, Terraform gates, CI/CD checks, or Envoy authorization. That's OPA's home turf. We don't play there at all.
You need policy depth. Rego handles partial evaluation, hierarchical data. Rules we simply can't express in Cedar. Ten years and 450-plus contributors show.
Free and Apache-2.0 matters more than support. OPA costs nothing. It embeds anywhere. CNCF graduation means no single vendor can change the terms. On you.
You have a platform team who wants to build the surrounding plumbing. Enough of them, to keep it running in three years.

Bottom line: OPA decides. DataShield decides, issues, revokes, and proves. Run both if you like. Keep OPA for your clusters. Put DataShield on the agent path, where the proof duty lands.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe the OPA project's public site. Its docs, and repos. As of the date above. If we got it wrong, email support@myorg.ai. We'll fix it, credited.

What matters	DataShield	Styra / OPA	Edge
Audit evidence	A SHA-256 hash chain. With Ed25519-signed checkpoints, themselves chained. Checking it names the failure. Tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Try the verifier.	Decision logs as JSON, shipped to an HTTP service. With a Rego masking rule for sensitive fields. The docs describe no crypto tamper proof. Whatever sink you ship them to owns that problem.	◆
Agent authorization	Each checked tool call passes a scope ceiling. Plus a declared access tier. It gets a revoke check before dispatch. Cedar covers admin, platform, config, and token calls.	A decision engine. It answers any question you send it. There is no agent identity model. No tool token. No revoke concept. You supply all three.	◆
Policy language	Cedar, with policy_explain and entitlement expansion. Deliberately narrow. Easier to read, harder to get clever with.	Rego. Partial evaluation, hierarchical data, rule indexing. A linter (Regal), a playground, editor plugins. Version 1.20.2 shipped 3 September 2026, with new `and` and `or` keywords. Genuinely better as a language.	◇
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes. It can't be quietly dropped from the log.	Not a concept in the engine. You'd write a Rego rule. You'd build the workflow. The expiry. The log.	◆
GDPR erasure	Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor IDs carry HMAC commitments. The chain still verifies after erasure.	Out of scope. A policy engine holds no subject data to erase. That's fair. But the erasure story: it lands entirely on you.	n/a
Data handling and tokenization	Datasets get tokenized at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization is a special, audited step. Plus quasi-identifier generalization. Dates become year, decade or age band. ZIPs become 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs and emails get partial masking too. Each column gets a measured cardinality-reduction score.	None. OPA evaluates data you hand it. Enterprise OPA added data filters for database-backed loads. That code is now donated to the community, though.	◆
MCP and agents	Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology, and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings. Per-call metering, tied to the agent.	One MCP entry in the ecosystem. A third-party server, for writing and debugging Rego. Filed under tooling, layer editor. It helps an LLM write policy. It doesn't authorize an agent.	◆
Kubernetes and infrastructure policy	Nothing. We don't do admission control. Or Terraform gates. Or CI/CD policy. We won't pretend to.	The default choice. Gatekeeper, Conftest, Envoy, Terraform, Docker, Kafka, SSH and sudo. A decade of integrations.	◇
Deployment	Self-hosted. In your own cloud or data center. Or on a dedicated single-tenant server we run. Your keys.	Anywhere. Sidecar, Go library, standalone service, or WASM. Bundles can be digitally signed. OPA refuses to activate one that fails a check. That's a nice touch.	◈
Vendor and support	Small team. We say so. Design-partner terms include source escrow. A small vendor isn't a single point of failure.	The OPA creators joined Apple in August 2025. So did much of the Styra team. Enterprise OPA, the Control Plane, the SDKs, Regal. All moved to the CNCF org. Styra DAS gets no mention there. And styra.com no longer resolves in DNS. The project's own support page lists two third-party firms. It says the list isn't vetted.	◆
Maturity signals	Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse run live now. Guardian and Lighthouse, since April 2026. SOC 2 isn't certified yet, and we say so.	CNCF graduated January 2021. 12.2k GitHub stars. Monthly releases. Named adopters: Goldman Sachs, Capital One, BNY Mellon, Atlassian. The project is in far better shape. Than we are.	◇
Pricing	Public model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	OPA is free under Apache 2.0. The paid tiers that used to sit above it. No public price. As of this date, no reachable website either.	◇

◆ DataShield leads◇ Styra / OPA leads◈ comparable

OPA claims are drawn from openpolicyagent.org. Plus the CNCF project page. Plus the open-policy-agent GitHub org. Last checked 13 September 2026. The Styra DNS check ran against 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8. Same date.

Three things you get here that you won't get from a policy engine

An identity for the agent, not just a decision about it

A policy engine takes a JSON input. It returns allow or deny. Something upstream has to decide who the caller is. It has to mint its token. Cap its scope. Hold its database credentials. That's Auth: SAML, OIDC, passkeys, RFC 9068 tokens, JWKS rotation. Plus a Connection Vault. See the pieces.

Proof the decision log wasn't edited

OPA's decision logs are honest JSON. They're also only as trustworthy. As the store you ship them to. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier tells you what broke. Not just that it did. That's the property EU AI Act Article 12 reviewers push on. It matters. Same for HIPAA §164.312(b). Try it in your browser.

Authority that changes mid-flight

An analyst quits on a Tuesday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield, the next checked tool call gets re-checked. Against current access. It fails closed. With a bundle-distributed policy, the fix ships later. On the next bundle poll. How the architecture handles it.

Where Styra / OPA is genuinely stronger

Rego is a better policy language than Cedar. That isn't close. Partial evaluation, hierarchical data, rule indexing. A linter written partly in Rego itself. That's the fruit of ten years. Plus more than 450 contributors. The integration surface is huge. Gatekeeper, Conftest, Envoy, Terraform, Kafka, SSH. CNCF graduation gives it neutral governance. No vendor-controlled engine has that. Cedar included. Cedar is the one we ship. If your job is cluster policy, use OPA. Stop reading.

Here's the push-back. Between the engine and a checked agent: a lot of work sits. Nobody hands you that part. Identity issuance. Token scoping. Access pulled in seconds. Credential storage. Break-glass. Evidence an examiner will accept, too. Teams reach for Styra DAS to close that gap. As of today, styra.com doesn't resolve. The paid code has been donated to the community. The Enterprise OPA README asks a question. Does anyone want to maintain it? The engine is thriving. The product that wrapped it is not. A platform lead should know that. Before the renewal talk they were expecting.

Questions worth asking both of us

These are the questions we'd want answered if we were buying. Ask them on every vendor call, including ours.

Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?

DataShield: yes. Each record commits to the one before it. Checkpoints are signed and chained. Checking tells deletion apart from truncation and tampering. Run it at /verify. OPA: its decision log docs cover masking. Plus shipping events to an HTTP service. No tamper-proof method gets named. The integrity question moves to whichever sink you pick. Ask that vendor instead.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks access on each checked tool call. Revocation bites on the next call. OPA has no agent or session model. Revocation means changing input data. Or pushing a new bundle. How fast that lands: depends on your bundle poll interval. And your own plumbing. Time that path before you trust it.

Is Styra still in business, and what happened to Styra DAS?

On 20 August 2025, the OPA creators announced it. They, and many Styra team members, had joined Apple. That same post moved Enterprise OPA, the new OPA Control Plane, the SDKs. Plus Regal. All into the CNCF OPA GitHub org. Styra DAS isn't mentioned anywhere in it. As of 13 September 2026: styra.com returns SERVFAIL. From public DNS resolvers. We can't check their side of the story. If you're a DAS customer: that's your account team's question. Assuming you can still find one.

So is OPA itself at risk?

No, and we'd rather you didn't read it that way. OPA is CNCF graduated. No change to governance or licence. The maintainer list is intact, with employers updated to Apple. Releases have kept a monthly pace, through v1.20.2 on 3 September 2026. Commercial support is now third-party. The project's support page lists two firms. It notes the list isn't vetted by maintainers. That's a buying fact, not a health warning.

Why Cedar instead of Rego?

We wanted policies a compliance reviewer could read. Without learning a new language. We also wanted an engine with clear-cut analysis. Rego wins on raw power. We'd rather lose that fight. Than ship policy nobody can review. Note what we don't claim. Cedar fires on admin, platform, config calls. And token calls, in Auth. Not on each tool dispatch. Tool calls go through scope ceilings. Access tiers. A revoke check. Anyone telling you their policy language checks each agent action. Ask them to show it live.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Auth runs live with a public threat model. And a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have run live since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. A small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

"the creators of Open Policy Agent (along with many team members from Styra) have joined Apple." Enterprise OPA, OPA Control Plane, the SDKs, and Regal move to the CNCF OPA GitHub org. Styra DAS is not mentioned. - Open Policy Agent blog, 20 Aug 2025
"EOPA has been donated to the OPA community… If you are interested in maintaining this project, please reach out to the maintainers." - open-policy-agent/eopa README, 13 Sep 2026
OPA reached CNCF Graduated maturity on 29 January 2021. - CNCF project page, 13 Sep 2026
Commercial support for OPA is listed as two third-party firms, with the note that the list "is not vetted by the OPA project maintainers." Styra is not listed. - openpolicyagent.org/support, 13 Sep 2026
Decision logs support Rego-based masking of sensitive fields. Plus delivery to an HTTP service. No cryptographic tamper evidence is described. - OPA docs, decision logs, 13 Sep 2026
OPA v1.20.2 released 3 September 2026; monthly release cadence intact. Repo shows 12.2k stars. - GitHub, open-policy-agent/opa, 13 Sep 2026

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