head to head · open source
kong vs laravel-backup
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. laravel-backup has 6,026 stars, 784 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 633% (44,148 vs 6,026 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; laravel-backup is written in PHP under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, laravel-backup 13%. laravel-backup was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (devops), 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 | laravel-backup | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 784 |
| 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 laravel-backup if
- You want the laravel-backup feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and laravel-backup 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 laravel-backup
laravel backup is an MIT licensed PHP package from Spatie that packages a Laravel application's files and its database dump into a single zip archive and stores that archive on any filesystem Laravel is configured to use, and it is aimed at Laravel developers and operations teams who want automated, verifiable, self hosted backups without a separate backup service.
read the full laravel-backup overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or laravel-backup more popular?
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars and laravel-backup has 6,026. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and laravel-backup free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and laravel-backup under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and laravel-backup?
kong is written in Lua and laravel-backup in PHP. 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 laravel-backup?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,148 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose laravel-backup if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.