Kong
Microservice API Gateway and Platform.
Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.
Commit activity more than 12% of tracked projects; popularity more than 95%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 44k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | 3.9.3 · 17 Jun 2026 |
| Repo updated | 23 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 |
| Built with | Lua, Docker, K8S, deb |
Is Kong actively maintained?
Kong is under active development: 24 commits landed over the last 11 months, averaging roughly 3 commits a month in the most recent quarter.
Activity is accelerating: the last quarter carried 150% more commits than the one before it.
The most recent tagged release, 3.9.3, is about 3 months old.
Kong ranks #9 of 16 in Software Development - API Management, placing it mid-table for maintenance activity.
What Kong actually does
Kong is an API gateway and platform designed to route, manage, and govern traffic between microservices. It typically sits between clients and your backend services to handle cross-cutting concerns like request routing and traffic control.
Best fit: It suits distributed architectures and teams managing multiple microservices that require centralised traffic routing and API governance.
Worth knowing: Managing a distributed API gateway can introduce significant operational complexity and latency overhead, especially when scaling across multiple nodes.
Deployment notes
You can deploy it using Docker, Kubernetes, or native deb packages, and it typically requires a persistent database backend such as PostgreSQL to store configuration.
Links
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