head to head · open source
kong vs webhook
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. webhook has 12,201 stars, 882 forks, 127 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. kong leads on adoption by 263% (44,348 vs 12,201 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; webhook is written in Go under MIT. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, webhook 7%. kong 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 | webhook | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-09-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 882 |
| 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 webhook if
- You want the webhook feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and webhook 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 webhook
What is webhook? ![build status][badge] [webhook][w] is a lightweight configurable tool written in Go, that allows you to easily create HTTP endpoints (hooks) on your server, which you can use to execute configured commands. You can also pass data from the HTTP request (such as headers, payload or query variables) to your commands. [webhook][w] also allows you to specify rules which have to be satisfied in order for the hook to be triggered. For example, if you're using Github or Bitbucket, you can use [webhook][w] to set up a hook that runs a redeploy script for your project on your staging server, whenever you…
read the full webhook overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or webhook more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and webhook has 12,201. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and webhook free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and webhook under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and webhook?
kong is written in Lua and webhook 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 webhook?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose webhook if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.