Developer Edition vs Watchlight Beacon (Enterprise)
The Developer Edition is the real engine, free and running in-process so you can evaluate the entire authorization model on your laptop. Watchlight Beacon is the same code pointed at the governed control plane — it doesn't replace anything, it adds what a fleet in production needs: signed lineage, central policy, fleet-wide governance, and the operator console.
Migrating is a configuration change, never a rewrite. The tools you decorate, the policies you write, and the guarantees you rely on — fail-closed, engine-side scope attenuation, explicit scopes — are identical in every mode.
Capability comparison
| Capability | Developer Edition | Watchlight Beacon (Enterprise) |
|---|---|---|
| Agent SDK | ✅ Included | ✅ Included |
| Framework / harness plugins | ✅ Included | ✅ Enterprise integration management |
| Authorization engine | Embedded, in-process (the real engine) | Full distributed policy service |
| Policies | Local Cedar policy files | Central policy lifecycle & management |
| Cedar policy language | ✅ Full language | ✅ Full language + governance |
| Agent authorization | Single-agent, in-process | Multi-agent fleet governance |
| Execution context | Local | Global execution graph |
| Delegation | In-process delegation-chain validation | Central authority + signed, cross-tenant |
| Sub-agent scope attenuation | In-process, strict-subset | Enterprise authority model |
| Lineage & audit | Local logs | Signed, tamper-evident execution lineage |
| Enforcement | Allow / Deny | Full enforcement-effect taxonomy |
| Revocation | Local | Fleet-wide revocation |
| Tool & network controls | Basic tool authorization | Agent + network enforcement |
| Environments | Single, local | Cross-environment governance |
| Drift & anomaly detection | — | Behavioral, goal-drift, arg-shape → auto-quarantine |
| Guardrails / PII screening | — | Dedicated guardrails service |
| Availability & scale | Single process | High availability & scale |
| Support | Community | Enterprise support & SLAs |
| Deployment | Your machine | Full sovereign / air-gapped deployment |
When to reach for Enterprise
Developers graduate at a moment of felt need, not a feature checklist. You've outgrown the Developer Edition when:
- Compliance asks "prove who authorized this in production" → you need signed, tamper-evident lineage.
- You're governing more than one agent, or more than one environment → central policy lifecycle and the global execution graph.
- Security wants a misbehaving agent stopped before its next action → drift/anomaly detection with automatic quarantine.
- You need to revoke authority fleet-wide, not process-by-process.
- Procurement needs SSO, RBAC, HA, SLAs, or sovereign / air-gapped deployment.
Each of these is a governance guarantee a single in-process engine structurally cannot provide — it needs the control plane.
One layer vs two: where enforcement lives
This is the deepest architectural difference, and the one that matters most when you move from evaluating to running in production.
Developer Edition is single-layer, in-process enforcement. The real engine renders the decision inside your process, and your code (or a plugin, or the MCP PEP) acts on it. That is exactly what you want for building and evaluating: zero infrastructure, real decisions, immediate feedback. But it means enforcement is in-band — it depends on the agent's own path calling the decision point and honoring the answer. An agent that can open its own socket to a tool or MCP server can, in principle, route around an in-process check it controls. Fail-safe, but cooperative.
Watchlight Beacon (Enterprise) adds a second, independent enforcement layer. The same engine still decides in-process — and a separate runtime governance plane mediates the agent's actual egress and tool traffic out-of-band from the agent itself. The two layers are independent chokepoints:
- Layer 1 — in-process decision (what the DE gives you): the fast, local
permit/denyat the call site. - Layer 2 — runtime enforcement (Enterprise): an out-of-band control point the governed agent cannot bypass, signing every action into tamper-evident lineage as it enforces.
The result is defense-in-depth: even if the in-process call is skipped, misused, or the agent misbehaves, the second layer still holds — and the audit trail is a complete, signed record rather than a cooperative one. Governance stops depending on the agent's good behavior and becomes a property of the environment it runs in.
A single in-process layer answers "is this allowed?". The second layer guarantees "nothing else got out" — the difference between a check an agent calls and a boundary it runs inside. That guarantee is the Enterprise plane; talk to us when you need it.
The boundary
The Developer Edition is a deliberate subset of the platform. The engine ships as a compiled wheel for local development; the governed control plane — signing, multi-tenant administration, guardrails, drift detection, the execution graph, and the operator console — is the Enterprise product, and is never bundled into the Developer Edition.
Ready for production? Talk to us about Enterprise.