head to head · open source
kong vs Terrateam
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. Terrateam has 1,281 stars, 74 forks, 110 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 3,346% (44,147 vs 1,281 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; Terrateam is written in OCaml under MPL-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, Terrateam 6%. Terrateam 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 | Terrateam | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | OCaml |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 74 |
| 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 Terrateam if
- You want the Terrateam feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches OCaml
- You evaluated both and Terrateam 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 Terrateam
Terrateam is a GitOps orchestration project for infrastructure as code. It is written in OCaml, released under the MPL 2.0 license, and listed under Infrastructure & Operations / Cloud Infrastructure Management. The project lives in the Terraform, OpenTofu, GitHub, GitLab, DevOps automation, and cloud infrastructure management ecosystem. Its README describes a pull request workflow for planning, reviewing, and applying infrastructure changes, and it states that Terrateam and Stategraph have merged into one platform during a gradual transition.
read the full Terrateam overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or Terrateam more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and Terrateam has 1,281. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and Terrateam free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Terrateam under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and Terrateam?
kong is written in Lua and Terrateam in OCaml. 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 Terrateam?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,147 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Terrateam if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.