head to head · open source
kong vs meshery
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. meshery has 12,116 stars, 4,086 forks, 1,983 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 266% (44,348 vs 12,116 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; meshery is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, meshery 34%. meshery 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| kong | meshery | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 meshery if
- You want the meshery feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and meshery 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 meshery
If you like Meshery, please ★ this repository to show your support! 🤩 MESHERY IS A CLOUD NATIVE COMPUTING FOUNDATION PROJECT A self service engineering platform, Meshery , is the open source, cloud native manager that enables the design and management of all Kubernetes based infrastructure and applications (multi cloud). As an extensible platform, Meshery offers visual and collaborative GitOps, freeing you from the chains of YAML while managing Kubernetes multi cluster deployments. Try Meshery in your browser using the Cloud Native Playground ( teaser video ) Functionality Infrastructure Lifecycle Management…
read the full meshery overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Cloud Infrastructure Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is kong or meshery more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and meshery has 12,116. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and meshery free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and meshery under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and meshery?
kong is written in Lua and meshery in TypeScript. 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 meshery?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose meshery if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.