head to head · open source
kong vs OpenTofu
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars, 5,238 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. OpenTofu has 30,703 stars, 1,414 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 44% (44,348 vs 30,703 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; OpenTofu is written in Go under MPL-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, OpenTofu 5%. OpenTofu was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | OpenTofu | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 31K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-19 | 2026-11-02 |
| 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 OpenTofu if
- You want the OpenTofu feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and OpenTofu 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 OpenTofu
Homepage Slack Get Started OpenTofu is an OSS tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. OpenTofu can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in house solutions. Getting help and contributing Have a question? Post it in GitHub Discussions Open a GitHub issue Join us in the opentofu channel on the CNCF Slack! Want to contribute? Please read the Contribution Guide. Recurring Events Community Meetings on Wednesdays at 12:30 UTC (calendar) Technical Steering Committee Meetings every other Tuesday at 4pm UTC (calendar) [!TIP] For more OpenTofu events…
read the full OpenTofu overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or OpenTofu more popular?
kong has 44,348 GitHub stars and OpenTofu has 30,703. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and OpenTofu free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and OpenTofu under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and OpenTofu?
kong is written in Lua and OpenTofu 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 OpenTofu?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,348 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose OpenTofu if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.