head to head · open source
kyverno vs agent-governance-toolkit
kyverno has 8,168 GitHub stars, 1,602 forks, 703 open issues and last shipped today. agent-governance-toolkit has 6,293 stars, 1,123 forks, 176 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kyverno leads on adoption by 30% (8,168 vs 6,293 stars). kyverno is written in Go under Apache-2.0; agent-governance-toolkit is written in Python under MIT. kyverno has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, agent-governance-toolkit 18%. kyverno was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (compliance, governance, security), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| kyverno | agent-governance-toolkit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.2K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick kyverno if
- You weight community size — 8.2K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick agent-governance-toolkit if
- You want the agent-governance-toolkit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and agent-governance-toolkit fits your workflow better
About kyverno
Kyverno is a Kubernetes native policy engine that lets platform engineering teams define security, compliance, automation, and governance rules as policy as code, using the Kubernetes tools they already run rather than a separate policy language.
read the full kyverno overview →
About agent-governance-toolkit
Agent Governance Toolkit is a Microsoft open source Python toolkit that adds policy enforcement, zero trust identity, execution sandboxing, and reliability engineering to autonomous AI agents, aimed at teams putting tool using or multi agent systems into production under compliance obligations.
read the full agent-governance-toolkit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kyverno or agent-governance-toolkit more popular?
kyverno has 8,168 GitHub stars and agent-governance-toolkit has 6,293. kyverno has the larger community by that measure.
Are kyverno and agent-governance-toolkit free?
Both are open source. kyverno is licensed under Apache-2.0 and agent-governance-toolkit under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kyverno and agent-governance-toolkit?
kyverno is written in Go and agent-governance-toolkit in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, kyverno or agent-governance-toolkit?
Choose kyverno if you want the larger community (8,168 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose agent-governance-toolkit if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.