head to head · open source
kong vs goss
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. goss has 6,000 stars, 502 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 639% (44,348 vs 6,000 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; goss is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, goss 8%. goss 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| kong | goss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 502 |
| 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 goss if
- You want the goss 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 goss 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 goss
Goss Quick and Easy server validation Goss in 45 seconds Note: For testing containers see the dgoss wrapper. Also, user submitted wrapper scripts for Kubernetes kgoss and Docker Compose dcgoss. Note: For some Docker/Kubernetes healthcheck, health endpoint, and container ordering examples, see [my blog post][kubernetes simplified health checks]. Introduction What is Goss? Goss is a YAML based serverspec alternative tool for validating a server's configuration. It eases the process of writing tests by allowing the user to generate tests from the current system state. Once the test suite is written they can be…
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 goss more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and goss has 6,000. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and goss free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and goss under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and goss?
kong is written in Lua and goss 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 goss?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose goss if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.