head to head · open source
kong vs freelens
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. freelens has 5,769 stars, 357 forks, 223 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 669% (44,348 vs 5,769 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; freelens is written in TypeScript under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, freelens 6%. freelens 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 | freelens | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 357 |
| 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 freelens if
- You want the freelens feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and freelens 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 freelens
Freelens Freelens is a free and open source user interface designed for managing Kubernetes clusters. It provides a standalone application compatible with macOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems, making it accessible to a wide range of users. The application aims to simplify the complexities of Kubernetes management by offering an intuitive and user friendly interface. Requirements Kubernetes 1.22 or later. Older clusters fall back to the bundled kubectl , which may not work correctly; a different one can be set in Preferences. Downloads See the releases page and download the right package for your system…
read the full freelens overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or freelens more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and freelens has 5,769. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and freelens free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and freelens under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and freelens?
kong is written in Lua and freelens in TypeScript. 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 freelens?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose freelens if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.