head to head · open source
kong vs terratest
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. terratest has 7,989 stars, 1,366 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 455% (44,348 vs 7,989 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; terratest is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, terratest 17%. terratest 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 | terratest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 8.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 terratest if
- You want the terratest feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and terratest 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 terratest
Terratest Terratest is a Go library that makes it easier to write automated tests for your infrastructure code. It provides a variety of helper functions and patterns for common infrastructure testing tasks, including: Testing Terraform code Testing Packer templates Testing Docker images Executing commands on servers over SSH Working with AWS APIs Working with Azure APIs Working with GCP APIs Working with Kubernetes APIs Testing Helm Charts Making HTTP requests Running shell commands And much more Install Requires Go 1.26 or later. To lock to a specific release instead of @latest , see Pinning a Terratest…
read the full terratest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or terratest more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and terratest has 7,989. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and terratest free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and terratest under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and terratest?
kong is written in Lua and terratest 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 terratest?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose terratest if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.