head to head · open source
kong vs Nitric
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. Nitric has 2,020 stars, 124 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 2,095% (44,348 vs 2,020 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; Nitric is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, Nitric 6%. Nitric was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai, cloud-native, devops), 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 | Nitric | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 124 |
| 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 Nitric if
- You want the Nitric feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Nitric 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 Nitric
Effortless backends with infrastructure from code Nitric is a multi language framework, with concise inline infrastructure from code. Modern applications should be robust, productive and a joy to build. Nitric solves common problems building for modern platforms: Easy infrastructure from code Build for any host without coupling Run locally IAM for humans Common resources like databases, queues/topics, APIs, key value, buckets and more Change services, IaC tools or cloud providers without changing code We also know abstraction should mean building on existing layers, not hiding them. Nitric includes powerful…
read the full Nitric overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or Nitric more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and Nitric has 2,020. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and Nitric free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Nitric under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and Nitric?
kong is written in Lua and Nitric in Go. 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 Nitric?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Nitric if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.