head to head · open source
kong vs trivy
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars, 5,210 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. trivy has 37,961 stars, 691 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kong leads on adoption by 16% (44,147 vs 37,961 stars). kong is written in Lua under Apache-2.0; trivy is written in Go under Apache-2.0. kong has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, trivy 2%. trivy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | trivy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 38K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 691 |
| 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 trivy if
- You want the trivy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and trivy 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 trivy
Trivy is an open source security scanner written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It is an Aqua Security open source project, hosted at trivy.dev, and it lives in the cloud native and DevSecOps ecosystem alongside container runtimes, Kubernetes clusters, and infrastructure as code tooling. The design separates two ideas: scanners, which describe the classes of security issue Trivy looks for, and targets, which describe where it looks. The README presents the project as a comprehensive and versatile scanner, and the topic list — containers, devsecops, docker, iac, infrastructure as code, kubernetes…
read the full trivy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is kong or trivy more popular?
kong has 44,147 GitHub stars and trivy has 37,961. kong has the larger community by that measure.
Are kong and trivy free?
Both are open source. kong is licensed under Apache-2.0 and trivy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between kong and trivy?
kong is written in Lua and trivy 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 trivy?
Choose kong if you want the larger community (44,147 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose trivy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.