head to head · open source
kong vs karpor
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. karpor has 1,730 stars, 113 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. kong leads on adoption by 2,452% (44,147 vs 1,730 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%. kong 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 | 2026-09-07 | 2026-07-12 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 113 |
| 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 (also known as Kong Gateway) is an open source, cloud native, platform agnostic API, LLM, and MCP gateway, licensed under Apache 2.0, built for platform, DevOps, and AI engineering teams that need a single high performance layer to route, secure, and observe both conventional API traffic and agentic LLM traffic.
About karpor
Karpor is an open source Kubernetes visualization tool written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the cloud native Kubernetes ecosystem and presents itself as a vendor neutral, developer friendly, community driven project for developer and platform engineering teams.
read the full karpor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or karpor more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and karpor has 1,730. 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 (44,147 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.