Comparison
Gateco vs OPA / Rego
Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a CNCF graduated policy engine with a Rego declarative policy language. It is the most widely deployed general-purpose authorization engine in cloud-native infrastructure. Gateco is purpose-built retrieval security for AI systems. They answer different questions.
Bottom line
OPA is a CNCF graduated policy engine and the standard for Kubernetes admission control, Envoy and service mesh authorization, with Rego covering RBAC, ABAC and ReBAC. Gateco is a purpose-built permission-aware retrieval layer that ships 12 native vector database connectors, IDP sync, built-in condition operators, deny-by-default on evaluation error, and a per-retrieval audit trail. Reaching the same result on OPA means custom Rego per connector plus a vector database adapter layer, an IDP bundle pipeline and a decision log integration.
| Capability | Gateco | OPA / Rego |
|---|---|---|
| Vector-DB-native retrieval enforcement OPA has no built-in vector DB connectors; integration requires custom data bundle authoring | Yes | No |
| 12 vector DB connectors out of the box | Yes | No |
| IDP sync (Okta, Entra ID, AWS IAM, GCP) OPA can consume IDP data via bundle push or sidecar; sync is your responsibility | Yes | No |
| RBAC / ABAC / ReBAC OPA supports all policy models via Rego; Gateco has built-in condition operators | Yes | Yes |
| Audit trail per retrieval OPA has decision logging; pipeline integration is your responsibility | Yes | partial |
| Fail-closed on evaluation error OPA returns undefined (not a denial) on evaluation errors by default | Yes | No |
| Grounded answers (policy-filtered LLM synthesis) | Yes | No |
| MCP server | Yes | No |
| Low-latency policy evaluation (measured 21ms p95 policy layer) OPA WASM compilation achieves <1ms on simple rules; Gateco policy-layer overhead measured 21ms p95, separately from the vector DB round-trip | Yes | Yes |
| GitOps policy distribution | partial | Yes |
| Kubernetes / Envoy / Istio integration OPA is the standard for k8s admission control and service mesh authz | No | Yes |
| Open source | On roadmap | Yes |
| CNCF graduated project | No | Yes |
OPA solves the infrastructure authorization problem. Gateco solves the retrieval authorization problem.
OPA is the right tool for authorizing Kubernetes admission requests, Envoy routing decisions, Terraform plan validation, and API gateway policies. It is designed to evaluate deterministic policies against structured data (JSON) at high frequency. If you're gating infrastructure operations, OPA is the standard.
Gateco is purpose-built for the specific challenge of AI retrieval: evaluating which chunks from a vector similarity search a given principal is allowed to see, using live IDP-synced principal data, across 12 different vector database APIs, with a grounded answer synthesis path, a fail-closed default, and a full audit trail. Building this on OPA would require custom Rego policies per connector, a vector DB adapter layer, an IDP data bundle pipeline, and a decision log integration, substantial engineering for every new connector or IDP.
When OPA is the right choice
If your primary need is authorization for infrastructure operations, Kubernetes admission, or service mesh traffic, OPA is the right choice and Gateco is the wrong one. If you're building AI applications that retrieve from vector databases and need fine-grained principal-context policy enforcement with minimal integration overhead, Gateco is designed for that problem and OPA is not.
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