head to head · open source
kong vs cds
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. cds has 4,847 stars, 457 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 815% (44,348 vs 4,847 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; cds is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, cds 9%. cds 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| kong | cds | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 457 |
| 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 cds if
- You want the cds feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cds 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 cds
CDS: Continuous Delivery Service CDS is an Enterprise Grade Continuous Delivery & DevOps Automation Platform written in Go(lang). This project is under active development Documentation Intuitive UI CDS provides an intuitive UI that allows you to build complex workflows, run them and dig into the logs when needed. Create and run workflow with CDS ui. The most powerful Command Line for a CI/CD Platform cdsctl is the CDS Command Line you can script everything with it, cdsctl also provides some cool commands such as cdsctl shell to browse your projects and workflows without the need to open a browser. See all cdsctl…
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 cds more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and cds has 4,847. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and cds free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cds under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and cds?
kong is written in Lua and cds 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 cds?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cds if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.