head to head · open source
kong vs fission
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. fission has 8,939 stars, 795 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 396% (44,348 vs 8,939 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; fission is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, fission 9%. fission was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (cloud-native, devops, 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| kong | fission | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 8.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 795 |
| 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 fission if
- You want the fission 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 fission 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 fission
Fission: Serverless Functions for Kubernetes Fission is an open source, Kubernetes native serverless framework that simplifies the deployment of functions and applications on Kubernetes. With Fission, developers can easily create and deploy serverless functions that can be triggered by a variety of events, such as HTTP requests, messages from a message queue, or scheduled tasks. Fission provides a simple, easy to use interface for developers to create serverless functions in their language of choice, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. The framework also offers automatic scaling, so…
read the full fission 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 fission more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and fission has 8,939. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and fission free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and fission under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and fission?
kong is written in Lua and fission 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 fission?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose fission if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.