head to head · open source
kong vs terragrunt
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. terragrunt has 9,837 stars, 1,227 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 349% (44,148 vs 9,837 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 12%. 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| kong | terragrunt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 9.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| 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 (also known as Kong Gateway) is an open source, cloud native, platform agnostic API, LLM, and MCP gateway, licensed under Apache 2.0, built for platform, DevOps, and AI engineering teams that need a single high performance layer to route, secure, and observe both conventional API traffic and agentic LLM traffic.
About terragrunt
Terragrunt is an MIT licensed, Go based orchestration tool that lets Infrastructure as Code written in OpenTofu or Terraform scale, and it is built for DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams that already run that tooling.
read the full terragrunt overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Cloud Infrastructure Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is kong or terragrunt more popular?
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars and terragrunt has 9,837. 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 (44,148 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose terragrunt if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.