head to head · open source
kong vs devspace
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. devspace has 5,225 stars, 429 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 749% (44,348 vs 5,225 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; devspace is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, devspace 8%. devspace 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, 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 | devspace | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 5.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 429 |
| 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 devspace if
- You want the devspace 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 devspace 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 devspace
Website • Quickstart • Documentation • Blog • Twitter Client Only Developer Tool for Cloud Native Development with Kubernetes Build, test and debug applications directly inside Kubernetes Develop with hot reloading : updates your running containers without rebuilding images or restarting containers Unify deployment workflows within your team and across dev, staging and production Automate repetitive tasks for image building and deployment ⭐️ Do you like DevSpace? Support the project with a star ⭐️ DevSpace was created by Loft Labs and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project. Contents Why…
read the full devspace overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or devspace more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and devspace has 5,225. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and devspace free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and devspace under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and devspace?
kong is written in Lua and devspace 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 devspace?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose devspace if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.