head to head · open source
kong vs Digger
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. Digger has 5,061 stars, 611 forks, 482 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 776% (44,348 vs 5,061 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; Digger is written in Go under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, Digger 12%. Digger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| kong | Digger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 5.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 611 |
| 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 Digger if
- You want the Digger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Digger 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 Digger
Community Slack Schedule a call Demo Video Docs Heads up: We’ve rebranded! Starting from 7th November 2025, the Digger project is now OpenTaco. The company’s still Digger, same battle tested engine — just a more apt name and a bigger vision. TL;DR Before: Best in class Terraform PR automation (a solid improvement upon Atlantis) After: The only piece of software you need to run Terraform or OpenTofu in production. We'll gradually update all our marketing material to reflect the same! CI/CD for Terraform is tricky. To make life easier, specialized CI systems aka TACOS exist Terraform Cloud, Spacelift, Atlantis…
read the full Digger overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Cloud Infrastructure Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is kong or Digger more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and Digger has 5,061. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and Digger free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Digger under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and Digger?
kong is written in Lua and Digger 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 Digger?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Digger if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.