head to head · open source
opa vs agent-governance-toolkit
opa has 12,256 GitHub stars, 1,686 forks, 310 open issues and last shipped yesterday. agent-governance-toolkit has 6,293 stars, 1,123 forks, 176 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opa leads on adoption by 95% (12,256 vs 6,293 stars). opa is written in Go under Apache-2.0; agent-governance-toolkit is written in Python under MIT. opa has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, agent-governance-toolkit 18%. opa was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (compliance), 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
| opa | agent-governance-toolkit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 12K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick opa if
- You weight community size — 12K 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 opa
Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open source, general purpose policy engine that enables unified, context aware policy enforcement across the entire stack. It lives in the cloud native ecosystem as a graduated project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape, and it is written in Go under the Apache 2.0 license. Policy is expressed declaratively in the Rego language, and the project ships alongside a CLI, an HTTP REST API, a Go SDK, and editor tooling rather than as a single binary alone. The repository has been active for roughly eleven years, with 12,234 stars, 1,679 forks, and a last push dated 15 Septe…
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 opa or agent-governance-toolkit more popular?
opa has 12,256 GitHub stars and agent-governance-toolkit has 6,293. opa has the larger community by that measure.
Are opa and agent-governance-toolkit free?
Both are open source. opa is licensed under Apache-2.0 and agent-governance-toolkit under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between opa and agent-governance-toolkit?
opa 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, opa or agent-governance-toolkit?
Choose opa if you want the larger community (12,256 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.