head to head · open source
kong vs kubevious
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. kubevious has 1,794 stars, 102 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. kong leads on adoption by 2,372% (44,348 vs 1,794 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; kubevious is written in various languages under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, kubevious 6%. 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 | kubevious | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | — |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-06-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 102 |
| 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 kubevious if
- You want the kubevious feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- You evaluated both and kubevious 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 kubevious
Kubevious (pronounced [kju:bvi:əs]) is a suite of app centric assurance, validation, and introspection products for Kubernetes. It helps running modern Kubernetes applications without disasters and costly outages by continuously validating application manifests, cluster state, and configuration. Kubevious projects detect and prevent errors( typos, misconfigurations, conflicts, inconsistencies ) and violations of best practices. Our secret sauce is based on the ability to validate across multiple manifests and look at the configuration from the application vantage point. Projects: 📺 Kubevious CLI 🔭 Kubevious…
read the full kubevious overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or kubevious more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and kubevious has 1,794. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and kubevious free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and kubevious under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and kubevious?
kong is written in Lua and kubevious in various languages. 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 kubevious?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose kubevious if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.