head to head · open source
kong vs burrito
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. burrito has 766 stars, 71 forks, 68 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 5,690% (44,348 vs 766 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; burrito is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, burrito 9%. burrito was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (kubernetes), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| kong | burrito | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 766 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 71 |
| 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 burrito if
- You want the burrito feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and burrito 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 burrito
[!WARNING] This project is still in a pre release state, minor versions will introduce breaking changes until 1.0 You should only use releases, as the main branch can be broken. burrito Burrito is a TACoS ( T erraform A utomation Co llaboration S oftware) Kubernetes Operator. Why does this exist? terraform is a tremendous tool to manage your infrastructure in IaC. However, it lacks built in solutions for managing state drift. Additionally, configuring a CI/CD pipeline for Terraform can be challenging and often varies depending on the selected tools. Finally, currently, there is no easy way to navigate your…
read the full burrito overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Cloud Infrastructure Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is kong or burrito more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and burrito has 766. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and burrito free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and burrito under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and burrito?
kong is written in Lua and burrito in Go. 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 burrito?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose burrito if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.