head to head · open source
kong vs terragrunt
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. terragrunt has 9,910 stars, 1,248 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 348% (44,348 vs 9,910 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; terragrunt is written in Go under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, terragrunt 13%. terragrunt was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | terragrunt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 9.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 terragrunt if
- You want the terragrunt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and terragrunt 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 terragrunt
Terragrunt 🎉 Terragrunt v1.0 is here! Read the announcement to learn more. Terragrunt is a flexible orchestration tool that allows Infrastructure as Code written in OpenTofu/Terraform to scale. Please see the following for more info, including install instructions and complete documentation: Terragrunt Website Getting started with Terragrunt Terragrunt Documentation Terragrunt Scale Contributing to Terragrunt Commercial Support Join the Discord! Join our community for discussions, support, and contributions: License This code is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt.
read the full terragrunt overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or terragrunt more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and terragrunt has 9,910. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and terragrunt free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and terragrunt under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and terragrunt?
kong is written in Lua and terragrunt 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 terragrunt?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose terragrunt if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.