head to head · open source
kong vs crossplane
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. crossplane has 12,222 stars, 1,289 forks, 194 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 263% (44,348 vs 12,222 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; crossplane is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, crossplane 11%. crossplane was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cloud-native, 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.
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Side by side
| kong | crossplane | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 crossplane if
- You want the crossplane 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 crossplane 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 crossplane
Crossplane is a framework for building cloud native control planes without needing to write code. It has a highly extensible backend that enables you to build a control plane that can orchestrate applications and infrastructure no matter where they run, and a highly configurable frontend that puts you in control of the schema of the declarative API it offers. Crossplane is a [Cloud Native Computing Foundation][cncf] project. Get Started Crossplane's [Get Started Docs] covers install and resource quickstarts. Releases Currently maintained releases, as well as the next few upcoming releases are listed below. For…
read the full crossplane overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or crossplane more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and crossplane has 12,222. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and crossplane free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crossplane under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and crossplane?
kong is written in Lua and crossplane 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 crossplane?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crossplane if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.