head to head · open source
kong vs meshery
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. meshery has 11,815 stars, 3,853 forks, 1,983 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 274% (44,147 vs 11,815 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 33%. 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.
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Side by side
| kong | meshery | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 3.9K |
| 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 (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 meshery
Meshery is an open source, cloud native manager — a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project released under the Apache 2.0 licence — that provides a self service engineering platform for designing and managing Kubernetes based infrastructure and applications across multiple clusters and multiple clouds, built for platform engineers, operators, and teams who manage Kubernetes at scale.
read the full meshery overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or meshery more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and meshery has 11,815. 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 (44,147 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.