head to head · open source
kong vs crossplane
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. crossplane has 12,083 stars, 1,264 forks, 194 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 265% (44,147 vs 12,083 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 10%. 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 | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-15 |
| 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 (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 crossplane
Crossplane is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation framework for building cloud native control planes without writing code, aimed at platform and infrastructure teams that run Kubernetes and need to orchestrate applications and infrastructure across clouds through declarative APIs.
read the full crossplane overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or crossplane more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and crossplane has 12,083. 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 (44,147 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.