head to head · open source
kong vs freelens
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. freelens has 5,588 stars, 331 forks, 223 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 690% (44,147 vs 5,588 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 | ★ 5.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 331 |
| 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 (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 freelens
Freelens is a free and open source user interface for managing Kubernetes clusters. It is distributed as a standalone desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and it exists inside the cloud native ecosystem alongside the containers, DevOps, and Kubernetes tooling that its topic list names. The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, and it reached its current shape over roughly two years of development. The public repository carries more than five thousand stars and over three hundred forks, with an active issue tracker and community channels on Discord and Reddit.…
read the full freelens overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or freelens more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and freelens has 5,588. 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 (44,147 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose freelens if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.