head to head · open source
kong vs karpor
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. karpor has 1,724 stars, 115 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 2,472% (44,348 vs 1,724 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; karpor is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, karpor 7%. karpor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cloud-native, 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 | karpor | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 115 |
| 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 karpor if
- You want the karpor 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 karpor 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 karpor
Intelligence for Kubernetes 🎮 Live Demo • 🌐 Website • ⚡️ Quick Start • 📚 Docs • 💬 Discussions [English] [中文] [Português] [日本語] What is Karpor? Karpor is Intelligence for Kubernetes. It brings advanced Search , Insight and AI to Kubernetes. It is essentially a Kubernetes Visualization Tool . With Karpor, you can gain crucial visibility into your Kubernetes clusters across any clouds. We hope to become a small and beautiful, vendor neutral, developer friendly, community driven open source project! Current Status : We are iterating v0.7.0, welcome to join the discussion. Why Karpor? 🔍 Search Automatic Syncing…
read the full karpor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or karpor more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and karpor has 1,724. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and karpor free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and karpor under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and karpor?
kong is written in Lua and karpor 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 karpor?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose karpor if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.