head to head · open source
kong vs mirrord
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. mirrord has 5,333 stars, 215 forks, 73 open issues and last shipped today. kong leads on adoption by 728% (44,148 vs 5,333 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; mirrord is written in Rust under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, mirrord 4%. mirrord was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cloud-native), 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 | mirrord | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 215 |
| 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 mirrord if
- You want the mirrord feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and mirrord 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 mirrord
mirrord is an MIT licensed Rust tool that runs any process, on a developer's machine or inside an AI coding agent's environment, as if it were a pod in a live Kubernetes cluster, with real environment variables, DNS, network, and traffic.
read the full mirrord overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or mirrord more popular?
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars and mirrord has 5,333. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and mirrord free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and mirrord under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and mirrord?
kong is written in Lua and mirrord in Rust. 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 mirrord?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,148 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose mirrord if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.