head to head · open source
kong vs dagger
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. dagger has 16,261 stars, 924 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 171% (44,147 vs 16,261 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; dagger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, dagger 6%. dagger 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 | dagger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 924 |
| 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 dagger if
- You want the dagger 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 dagger 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 dagger
Dagger is an open source automation engine for software delivery, written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It builds, tests and ships any codebase, and it runs locally, inside a CI server, or directly in the cloud. The project lives in the cloud infrastructure and CI/CD ecosystem, where it occupies the space normally filled by shell scripts and proprietary pipeline YAML. It has been developed for roughly seven years and carries a substantial community footprint, with more than sixteen thousand stars and over nine hundred forks on GitHub.
read the full dagger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or dagger more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,261. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and dagger free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dagger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and dagger?
kong is written in Lua and dagger 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 dagger?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,147 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dagger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.