head to head · open source
kong vs sops
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. sops has 23,147 stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. kong leads on adoption by 91% (44,147 vs 23,147 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, sops 5%. sops 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 | sops | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 23K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 sops if
- You want the sops 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 sops 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 sops
SOPS, short for Secrets OPerationS, is an editor of encrypted files written in Go and released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. It handles YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats, and it encrypts those files using AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, or PGP. The project lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem: it started at Mozilla in 2015, was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2023, and is now a CNCF Sandbox project under a new group of maintainers. It carries 23,121 stars and 1,080 forks, with documentation hosted at getsops.io.
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or sops more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and sops has 23,147. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and sops free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sops under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and sops?
kong is written in Lua and sops 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 sops?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,147 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.