head to head · open source
kong vs itamae
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. itamae has 1,134 stars, 117 forks, 38 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 3,811% (44,348 vs 1,134 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; itamae is written in Ruby under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, itamae 10%. itamae was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | itamae | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 117 |
| 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 itamae if
- You want the itamae feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and itamae 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 itamae
Simple and lightweight configuration management tool inspired by Chef. CHANGELOG Concept Chef like DSL (but not compatible with Chef) Simpler and lighter weight than Chef Only recipes Idempotent Installation Getting Started Create a recipe file as recipe.rb : And then execute itamae command to apply a recipe to a local machine. Or you can apply a recipe to a remote machine by itamae ssh . You can also apply a recipe to Vagrant VM by itamae ssh vagrant . You can find further information to use Itamae on Itamae Wiki. Enjoy! Documentation Run tests Requirements: Vagrant Get Involved Join Slack team Presentations /…
read the full itamae overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or itamae more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and itamae has 1,134. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and itamae free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and itamae under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and itamae?
kong is written in Lua and itamae in Ruby. 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 itamae?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose itamae if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.