head to head · open source
kong vs floci
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. floci has 24,500 stars, 2,645 forks, 130 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 80% (44,147 vs 24,500 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; floci is written in Java under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, floci 11%. floci 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 | floci | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 25K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 floci if
- You want the floci feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and floci 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 floci
Floci is a free, MIT licensed, open source local AWS emulator that gives developers, testers, and CI pipelines AWS shaped services on their own machine without a cloud account, an auth token, or paid feature gates.
read the full floci overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or floci more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and floci has 24,500. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and floci free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and floci under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and floci?
kong is written in Lua and floci in Java. 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 floci?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,147 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose floci if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.