head to head · open source
kong vs trivy
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. trivy has 38,915 stars, 818 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 14% (44,348 vs 38,915 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, trivy 2%. trivy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (kubernetes), 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 | trivy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 39K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 818 |
| 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 trivy if
- You want the trivy 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 trivy 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 trivy
[![GitHub Release][release img]][release] [![Test][test img]][test] [![Go Report Card][go report img]][go report] [![License: Apache 2.0][license img]][license] [![GitHub Downloads][github downloads img]][release] ![Docker Pulls][docker pulls] [📖 Documentation][docs] Trivy ([pronunciation][pronunciation]) is a comprehensive and versatile security scanner. Trivy has scanners that look for security issues, and targets where it can find those issues. Targets (what Trivy can scan): Container Image Filesystem Git Repository (remote) Virtual Machine Image Kubernetes Scanners (what Trivy can find there): OS packages…
read the full trivy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or trivy more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and trivy has 38,915. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and trivy free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and trivy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and trivy?
kong is written in Lua and trivy 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 trivy?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose trivy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.