Styra DAS is managed OPA. WardenAuth is RBAC without Rego.
Styra DAS is the commercial management plane for Open Policy Agent — providing a visual editor for Rego policies, decision logging, and compliance reporting. But it's priced for enterprise infrastructure teams: custom pricing typically starting at $1,000+/month. WardenAuth provides RBAC, ReBAC, audit, and multi-tenancy with flat-rate pricing starting at $79/month — no Rego required.
Overview
Styra DAS is the most mature managed OPA platform available. It provides a web UI for authoring Rego policies, a decision log for audit trails, and compliance reporting for regulated environments.
But Styra inherits OPA's Rego learning curve and adds enterprise pricing on top. For teams that don't need infrastructure policy enforcement (Kubernetes admission control, Terraform validation) and only need application-level authorization, WardenAuth's structured data model and flat-rate pricing is a simpler, more affordable alternative.
Styra DAS — Strengths
- Managed OPA — no infrastructure to run
- Visual Rego policy editor
- Comprehensive decision logging
- Compliance reporting and audit
- Multi-use case: K8s, API, Terraform
- Enterprise support and SLAs
Styra DAS — Limitations
- Custom pricing — typically $1,000+/month starting point
- Still requires Rego knowledge for policy authoring
- Overkill for application-only authorization
- No built-in API key management
- No multi-tenancy primitives
- No SoD, approvals, or SCIM
Pricing comparison
| Scenario | Styra DAS | WardenAuth |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Custom (typically $1K+/mo) | Free (50K checks) |
| 1M checks/month | ~$1,000-2,000/mo | $79/mo (Starter) |
| 10M checks/month | ~$2,000-5,000/mo | $249/mo (Growth) |
| Management dashboard | Included (Styra DAS) | Included |
Feature comparison
| Feature | Styra DAS | WardenAuth |
|---|---|---|
| Fine-grained RBAC | Via Rego | |
| ABAC / attribute conditions | ||
| Managed OPA / PDP | ||
| RBAC management UI | Via Rego editor | |
| Audit trail | Decision log | |
| API key management | ||
| Multi-tenant scopes | ||
| SoD / Approval workflows | ||
| Webhooks | ||
| SSO / SCIM | Included (Business+) | |
| K8s admission control | ||
| Flat-rate pricing | ||
| No Rego required |
When each makes sense
Choose Styra DAS if you need managed OPA across multiple use cases (K8s admission + API authorization + Terraform validation), already have Rego expertise, or need the compliance reporting capabilities of the enterprise-grade OPA management plane.
Choose WardenAuth if your primary need is application-level authorization (RBAC + ReBAC for SaaS), you want a dashboard that non-engineers can use, and flat-rate predictable pricing matters. Also the better choice if you want to avoid the Rego learning curve.
Styra DAS is the right platform if you need enterprise-grade managed OPA across Kubernetes, APIs, and infrastructure — and have the budget and Rego expertise. For application-level authorization, WardenAuth provides the same RBAC + ABAC capabilities with a simpler model and at a fraction of the cost.
See for yourself — no credit card required.