head to head · open source
kong vs aws-cdk
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. aws-cdk has 12,958 stars, 4,665 forks, 2,863 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 242% (44,348 vs 12,958 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; aws-cdk is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, aws-cdk 36%. aws-cdk was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | aws-cdk | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 4.7K |
| 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 aws-cdk if
- You want the aws-cdk feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and aws-cdk 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 aws-cdk
AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. It offers a high level object oriented abstraction to define AWS resources imperatively using the power of modern programming languages. Using the CDK’s library of infrastructure constructs, you can easily encapsulate AWS best practices in your infrastructure definition and share it without worrying about boilerplate logic. The CDK is available in the following languages: JavaScript, TypeScript (Node.js =…
read the full aws-cdk overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or aws-cdk more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and aws-cdk has 12,958. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and aws-cdk free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and aws-cdk under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and aws-cdk?
kong is written in Lua and aws-cdk in TypeScript. 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 aws-cdk?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose aws-cdk if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.