head to head · open source
kong vs open-ontologies
kong has 44,357 GitHub stars, 5,240 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. open-ontologies has 2,814 stars, 314 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 1,476% (44,357 vs 2,814 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; open-ontologies is written in Rust under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, open-ontologies 11%. open-ontologies was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | open-ontologies | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 314 |
| 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 open-ontologies if
- You want the open-ontologies feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and open-ontologies 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 open-ontologies
Open Ontologies Plan a change to a production ontology. See every consequence before you apply it. Then give the reviewer a proof that they can check without trust in you. Open Ontologies is written in Rust. It ships as one binary. tesseractsemantics.com English · 简体中文 Put in one spreadsheet. Get one ontology, with the evidence for each line. Then change one cell, and see the shape find the error. The page runs the released binary. We build this into a platform → tesseractsemantics.com The engine is MIT, and it stays MIT. The platform is the hosted version of the engine. 426 asserted, 259 certified, 1…
read the full open-ontologies overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or open-ontologies more popular?
kong has 44,357 GitHub stars and open-ontologies has 2,814. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and open-ontologies free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and open-ontologies under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and open-ontologies?
kong is written in Lua and open-ontologies 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 open-ontologies?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,357 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose open-ontologies if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.