head to head · open source
kong vs infracost
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. infracost has 12,605 stars, 701 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 252% (44,348 vs 12,605 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 6%. 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 | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 701 |
| 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 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 infracost
Cloud cost intelligence for engineers, AI coding agents, and CI/CD. Infracost shows cloud cost estimates and FinOps best practices for Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, and AWS CDK — before changes are deployed . See costs in your terminal, your editor, your AI coding agent, or right in pull requests. The Infracost Dev toolkit Infracost meets engineers wherever they work with infrastructure code — the terminal, their editor, their AI coding agent, and their CI pipeline. Every entry point talks to the same engine, the same pricing data, and the same FinOps policies, so a check you set up once shows up…
read the full infracost overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or infracost more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and infracost has 12,605. 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 (44,348 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.