head to head · open source
kong vs mcp-gateway
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. mcp-gateway has 903 stars, 94 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 4,811% (44,348 vs 903 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; mcp-gateway is written in C# under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, mcp-gateway 10%. mcp-gateway was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai, api-gateway), 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 | mcp-gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 903 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | C# |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 94 |
| 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 mcp-gateway if
- You want the mcp-gateway feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and mcp-gateway 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 mcp-gateway
MCP Gateway MCP Gateway is a reverse proxy and management layer for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, enabling scalable, session aware routing, authorization and lifecycle management of MCP servers in Kubernetes environments. Table of Contents Overview Key Concepts Architecture Features Getting Started – Local Deployment Getting Started – 1 Click Deploy to Azure Overview This project provides: A data gateway for routing traffic to MCP servers with session affinity. A control plane for managing the MCP server lifecycle (deploy, update, delete). Enterprise ready integration points including telemetry, access…
read the full mcp-gateway overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or mcp-gateway more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and mcp-gateway has 903. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and mcp-gateway free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and mcp-gateway under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and mcp-gateway?
kong is written in Lua and mcp-gateway in C#. 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 mcp-gateway?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose mcp-gateway if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.