head to head · open source
kong vs infracost
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. infracost has 12,521 stars, 688 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 253% (44,147 vs 12,521 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; infracost is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, infracost 5%. infracost 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 | infracost | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 688 |
| 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 infracost if
- You want the infracost 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 infracost 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 infracost
Infracost is an open source cloud cost intelligence tool, written in Go and licensed Apache 2.0, that estimates cloud spend and enforces FinOps policies for Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation and AWS CDK before changes are deployed — built for engineers, platform and DevOps teams, FinOps practitioners, and AI coding agents.
read the full infracost overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or infracost more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and infracost has 12,521. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and infracost free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and infracost under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and infracost?
kong is written in Lua and infracost 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 infracost?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,147 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose infracost if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.