head to head · open source
kong vs jenkins
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. jenkins has 26,719 stars, 9,819 forks, 3,610 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 66% (44,348 vs 26,719 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; jenkins is written in Java under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, jenkins 37%. jenkins was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (devops), 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
| kong | jenkins | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 27K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Java |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 9.8K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick kong if
- You weight community size — 44K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick jenkins if
- You want the jenkins feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and jenkins fits your workflow better
About kong
[![][kong logo]][kong url] [![Build Status][badge action image]][badge action url] Kong or Kong Gateway is a cloud native, platform agnostic, scalable API 𖧹 LLM 𖧹 MCP Gateway distinguished for its high performance and extensibility via plugins. It also provides advanced AI traffic capabilities with multi LLM support, semantic security, MCP traffic security and analytics, and more. By providing functionality for proxying, routing, load balancing, health checking, authentication (and more), Kong serves as the central layer for orchestrating microservices or conventional API traffic and agentic LLM and MCP as…
About jenkins
Table of Contents About What to Use Jenkins for and When to Use It Downloads Getting Started (Development) Source Contributing to Jenkins News and Website Governance Adopters License About In a nutshell, Jenkins is the leading open source automation server. Built with Java, it provides over 2,000 plugins to support automating virtually anything, so that humans can spend their time doing things machines cannot. What to Use Jenkins for and When to Use It Use Jenkins to automate your development workflow, so you can focus on work that matters most. Jenkins is commonly used for: Building projects Running tests to…
read the full jenkins overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or jenkins more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and jenkins has 26,719. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and jenkins free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and jenkins under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and jenkins?
kong is written in Lua and jenkins in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, kong or jenkins?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose jenkins if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.