head to head · open source
kong vs tutorials
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. tutorials has 4,711 stars, 3,117 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 841% (44,348 vs 4,711 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; tutorials is written in HCL under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, tutorials 66%. tutorials was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (devops, 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 | tutorials | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | HCL |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| 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 tutorials if
- You want the tutorials feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HCL
- You evaluated both and tutorials 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 tutorials
New Video Consulting 👨💼 Mentorship/On the Job Support/Consulting Calendar or me@antonputra.com 👀 Check out recommendations from my previous clients. Playlists 📚 [Terraform Tutorial on AWS [Full Course]]( 📚 [AWS EKS Kubernetes Tutorial [Full Course]]( 📚 Argo CD Tutorials 📚 Kubernetes Tutorials 📚 Benchmarks Contents 📚 Lessons Social 🎥 YouTube 💼 LinkedIn 🛠️ Twitter/X 🙋♂️ Instagram 📨 me@antonputra.com
read the full tutorials overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or tutorials more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and tutorials has 4,711. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and tutorials free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tutorials under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and tutorials?
kong is written in Lua and tutorials in HCL. 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 tutorials?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tutorials if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.