head to head · open source
kong vs k8sgpt
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. k8sgpt has 8,289 stars, 1,090 forks, 89 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 435% (44,348 vs 8,289 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; k8sgpt is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, k8sgpt 13%. k8sgpt was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai, 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 | k8sgpt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 8.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 k8sgpt if
- You want the k8sgpt 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 k8sgpt 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 k8sgpt
k8sgpt is a tool for scanning your Kubernetes clusters, diagnosing, and triaging issues in simple English. It has SRE experience codified into its analyzers and helps to pull out the most relevant information to enrich it with AI. Out of the box integration with OpenAI, Azure, Cohere, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini and local models. Sister project: Check out sympozium for managing agents in Kubernetes. Table of Contents Overview Installation Quick Start Analyzers Examples LLM AI Backends Key Features Model Context Protocol (MCP) Documentation Contributing Community CLI Installation Linux/Mac via brew or RPM based…
read the full k8sgpt overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or k8sgpt more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and k8sgpt has 8,289. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and k8sgpt free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and k8sgpt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and k8sgpt?
kong is written in Lua and k8sgpt 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 k8sgpt?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose k8sgpt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.