head to head · open source
kong vs terratest
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. terratest has 7,943 stars, 1,371 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 456% (44,148 vs 7,943 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 | ★ 7.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| 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 (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 terratest
Terratest is an Apache 2.0 Go library maintained by Gruntwork that provides helper functions and patterns for writing automated tests against infrastructure code, and it is aimed at engineers who validate Terraform modules, Packer templates, Docker images, Kubernetes resources and AWS, Azure or GCP infrastructure inside a Go test suite.
read the full terratest overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or terratest more popular?
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars and terratest has 7,943. 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 (44,148 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.