head to head · open source
kong vs jx
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. jx has 4,691 stars, 787 forks, 143 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 845% (44,348 vs 4,691 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; jx is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, jx 17%. jx was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | jx | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 787 |
| 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 jx if
- You want the jx 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 jx 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 jx
JayeX CLI jx is the modular command line CLI for JayeX 3.x Commands See the jx command reference Issues To track issues in this repository and all the related Plugins use these links: view open issues in jenkins x plugins view open pull requests in jenkins x plugins Plugins You can browse the documentation for all of the jx plugins at: Plugin CLI Reference Plugin Source Components jx git operator is an operator for triggering jobs when git commits are made octant jx an open source JayeX UI for vmware tanzu/octant Libraries These are the modular libraries which have been refactored out of the main jenkins x/jx…
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or jx more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and jx has 4,691. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and jx free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and jx under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and jx?
kong is written in Lua and jx 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 jx?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose jx if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.