head to head · open source
kong vs cds
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. cds has 4,843 stars, 453 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 812% (44,148 vs 4,843 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.
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Side by side
| kong | cds | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 453 |
| 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 (also known as Kong Gateway) is an open source, cloud native, platform agnostic API, LLM, and MCP gateway, licensed under Apache 2.0, built for platform, DevOps, and AI engineering teams that need a single high performance layer to route, secure, and observe both conventional API traffic and agentic LLM traffic.
About cds
CDS is an open source, enterprise grade continuous delivery and DevOps automation platform written in Go, for teams that build, run and own their own CI/CD workflows and want to script and scale them without depending on a hosted vendor.
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or cds more popular?
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars and cds has 4,843. 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 (44,148 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.