head to head · open source
kong vs portainer
kong has 44,344 GitHub stars, 5,237 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. portainer has 38,767 stars, 2,934 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 14% (44,344 vs 38,767 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, portainer 8%. portainer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | portainer | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 39K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Zlib |
| Written in | Lua | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 2.9K |
| 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 portainer if
- You want the portainer feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Zlib license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and portainer 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 portainer
Portainer Community Edition is a free, lightweight container management UI for Docker, Swarm, Podman, Kubernetes, and ACI environments. It is provided as is, at no cost, for the convenience of homelab operators, hobbyists, students, and anyone experimenting with containers on their own hardware. Portainer Business Edition builds on the same open source base and adds the features, hardening, and commercial support that production and enterprise environments require (RBAC, GitOps, edge management, audit, SSO, and more). Find out more about Portainer Business Edition features Take3 – get 3 free nodes of Portainer…
read the full portainer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or portainer more popular?
kong has 44,344 GitHub stars and portainer has 38,767. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and portainer free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and portainer under Zlib. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and portainer?
kong is written in Lua and portainer 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 portainer?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,344 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose portainer if its feature set, stack or Zlib licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.