head to head · open source
kong vs fission
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. fission has 8,920 stars, 794 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 395% (44,148 vs 8,920 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.
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Side by side
| kong | fission | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 8.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 794 |
| 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 (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 fission
Fission is an open source, Kubernetes native serverless framework that lets developers deploy functions triggered by HTTP requests, message queue messages, or scheduled tasks without managing the underlying infrastructure.
read the full fission overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or fission more popular?
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars and fission has 8,920. 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 (44,148 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.