head to head · open source
kong vs tutorials
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. tutorials has 4,692 stars, 3,112 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. kong leads on adoption by 841% (44,148 vs 4,692 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%. kong 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 | 2026-09-07 | 2026-05-17 |
| 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 (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 tutorials
tutorials is an MIT licensed collection of DevOps lesson material and supporting infrastructure code, organised around the author's YouTube courses and aimed at engineers who want runnable examples for Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Ansible, Packer and serverless work.
read the full tutorials overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or tutorials more popular?
kong has 44,148 GitHub stars and tutorials has 4,692. 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 (44,148 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tutorials if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.