StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Code Collaboration Version Control
  5. GitLab vs Kong

GitLab vs Kong

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

GitLab
GitLab
Stacks63.4K
Followers54.5K
Votes2.5K
GitHub Stars0
Forks0
Kong
Kong
Stacks671
Followers1.5K
Votes139
GitHub Stars42.1K
Forks5.0K

GitLab vs Kong: What are the differences?

  1. Hosting and Version Control: GitLab is primarily a hosting platform for code repositories and provides version control functionalities, enabling teams to collaborate on code projects. On the other hand, Kong is an API management platform that helps organizations manage their APIs effectively, enabling authentication, traffic control, and monitoring of APIs.

  2. Purpose: GitLab is designed for software development teams to work collaboratively on code, manage project timelines, and streamline the development process. Kong, on the other hand, is focused on helping businesses in managing their APIs, ensuring security, performance, and scalability of API endpoints.

  3. Features: GitLab offers features such as issue tracking, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), code review, and project management tools. Kong, on the other hand, provides functionalities like API gateway, load balancing, authentication, logging, and analytics for APIs.

  4. Community: GitLab has a large and active community of developers contributing to its open-source platform, offering extensive documentation and support resources. Kong also has a community edition but is mainly known for its enterprise offerings with additional features and support.

  5. Integration: GitLab can be integrated with various third-party tools and services for enhancing its functionality, including project management tools, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud services. Kong can also integrate with various plugins, databases, and monitoring tools to extend its capabilities in API management.

  6. Target Users: GitLab is commonly used by software development teams, DevOps engineers, and project managers looking for an all-in-one solution for version control, collaboration, and project management. Kong, on the contrary, is usually used by API developers, architects, and administrators aiming to streamline API management and improve API performance and security.

In Summary, GitLab is a platform for hosting code repositories and facilitating version control, while Kong is an API management tool designed for efficiently managing APIs in organizations.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on GitLab, Kong

Anonymous
Anonymous

May 25, 2020

Decided

Gitlab as A LOT of features that GitHub and Azure DevOps are missing. Even if both GH and Azure are backed by Microsoft, GitLab being open source has a faster upgrade rate and the hosted by gitlab.com solution seems more appealing than anything else! Quick win: the UI is way better and the Pipeline is way easier to setup on GitLab!

624k views624k
Comments
Weverton
Weverton

CTO at SourceLevel

Jul 28, 2020

Review

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?

944k views944k
Comments
Weverton
Weverton

CTO at SourceLevel

Aug 3, 2020

Review

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

  • Pick the correct target branch
  • Make Drafts explicit
  • Name things properly
  • Ask help for tools
  • Remove the noise
  • Fetch necessary data
  • Understand Mergeability
  • Pass the message
  • Add screenshots
  • Be found in the future
  • Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

1.19M views1.19M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

GitLab
GitLab
Kong
Kong

GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers.

Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.

Manage git repositories with fine grained access controls that keep your code secure;Perform code reviews and enhance collaboration with merge requests;Each project can also have an issue tracker and a wiki;Used by more than 100,000 organizations, GitLab is the most popular solution to manage git repositories on-premises;Completely free and open source (MIT Expat license);Powered by Ruby on Rails
Logging: Log requests and responses to your system over TCP, UDP or to disk; OAuth2.0: Add easily an OAuth2.0 authentication to your APIs; Monitoring: Live monitoring provides key load and performance server metrics; IP-restriction: Whitelist or blacklist IPs that can make requests; Authentication: Manage consumer credentials query string and header tokens; Rate-limiting: Block and throttle requests based on IP or authentication; Transformations: Add, remove or manipulate HTTP params and headers on-the-fly; CORS: Enable cross-origin requests to your APIs that would otherwise be blocked; Anything: Need custom functionality? Extend Kong with your own Lua plugins;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
0
GitHub Stars
42.1K
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
5.0K
Stacks
63.4K
Stacks
671
Followers
54.5K
Followers
1.5K
Votes
2.5K
Votes
139
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 508
    Self hosted
  • 431
    Free
  • 339
    Has community edition
  • 242
    Easy setup
  • 240
    Familiar interface
Cons
  • 28
    Slow ui performance
  • 9
    Introduce breaking bugs every release
  • 6
    Insecure (no published IP list for whitelisting)
  • 2
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 1
    Review Apps feature
Pros
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
Integrations
No integrations available
Cassandra
Cassandra
Docker
Docker
Prometheus
Prometheus
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
NGINX
NGINX
Vagrant
Vagrant

What are some alternatives to GitLab, Kong?

GitHub

GitHub

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

Bitbucket

Bitbucket

Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users.

RhodeCode

RhodeCode

RhodeCode provides centralized control over distributed code repositories. Developers get code review tools and custom APIs that work in Mercurial, Git & SVN. Firms get unified security and user control so that their CTOs can sleep at night

AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit

CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.

Gogs

Gogs

The goal of this project is to make the easiest, fastest and most painless way to set up a self-hosted Git service. With Go, this can be done in independent binary distribution across ALL platforms that Go supports, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Gitea

Gitea

Git with a cup of tea! Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service, including Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD. It published under the MIT license.

Upsource

Upsource

Upsource summarizes recent changes in your repository, showing commit messages, authors, quick diffs, links to detailed diff views and associated code reviews. A commit graph helps visualize the history of commits, branches and merges in your repository.

Beanstalk

Beanstalk

A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

GitBucket

GitBucket

GitBucket provides a Github-like UI and features such as Git repository hosting via HTTP and SSH, repository viewer, issues, wiki and pull request.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp