head to head · open source
kong vs mirrord
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. mirrord has 5,400 stars, 226 forks, 73 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 721% (44,348 vs 5,400 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 | ★ 5.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 226 |
| 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 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 mirrord
mirrord runs your local process inside a live Kubernetes cluster. It works the same way for developers and for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Windsurf): your code runs on your machine, but mirrord routes its traffic, files, and environment variables through a target pod in the cluster. That covers both halves of the software development loop. Read live cluster context while writing the code (real env vars, real service responses, real queue contents) so the change is grounded in what's actually deployed. Then run the code against those same services and data to confirm it works end to…
read the full mirrord overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or mirrord more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and mirrord has 5,400. 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 (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose mirrord if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.