Kong vs OpenResty

Overview

Kong

Stacks671

Followers1.5K

Votes139

GitHub Stars42.1K

Forks5.0K

OpenResty

Stacks2.3K

Followers227

Votes0

Kong vs OpenResty: What are the differences?

Performance: Kong is built on top of OpenResty, but it adds additional features and functionalities to enhance performance. Kong provides a high-performance API gateway with built-in load balancing and caching capabilities. It uses a hybrid event-driven and threaded architecture to efficiently handle a large number of requests simultaneously. On the other hand, OpenResty is a web platform that embeds the Lua programming language into NGINX, allowing developers to extend NGINX with custom Lua scripts. While OpenResty can also achieve high performance, it requires writing custom Lua code to implement advanced functionalities.
Plugin Ecosystem: Kong boasts a comprehensive plugin ecosystem, offering a wide range of pre-built plugins that can be easily integrated into API gateway workflows. These plugins enable functionalities such as authentication, rate limiting, request and response transformations, and logging. OpenResty, on the other hand, does not have a built-in plugin ecosystem. Developers need to write custom Lua scripts or leverage existing Lua libraries to implement similar functionalities.
Administration and Configuration: Kong provides a user-friendly administration API and web interface, making it easy for developers and administrators to manage the API gateway and configure its various components. It offers fine-grained control over routing, request/response transformations, and security policies through a declarative configuration approach. OpenResty, being an extension of NGINX, relies on NGINX's configuration language and requires manual configuration file editing to manage the server and its components.
Enterprise Support: Kong offers enterprise-grade support through its commercial offering, Kong Enterprise. This includes features like professional support, on-premises installations, and enterprise plugins specifically designed for large-scale deployments. OpenResty, on the other hand, does not have a commercial offering and mainly relies on community support.
Logging and Analytics: Kong provides built-in logging and analytics capabilities, enabling developers and administrators to monitor and analyze API traffic. It supports various log storage and analysis providers, making it easier to integrate with existing monitoring and analytics systems. OpenResty, being an extension of NGINX, relies on NGINX's logging capabilities that require manual configuration and may require additional tools or scripts for log analysis.
Ease of Deployment: Kong offers various deployment options, including on-premises, cloud, and Kubernetes-based deployments. It provides pre-built Docker images and Helm charts for easy setup and configuration in containerized environments. OpenResty, being a web platform, can be deployed in similar environments but requires manual setup and configuration, potentially involving more effort.

In summary, Kong provides a feature-rich API gateway built on top of OpenResty, offering enhanced performance, a comprehensive plugin ecosystem, user-friendly administration and configuration, enterprise-grade support, built-in logging and analytics capabilities, and easy deployment options. OpenResty, while highly performant and extensible with Lua, requires more manual effort for configuration, lacks a built-in plugin ecosystem, and does not offer commercial support.

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Advice on Kong, OpenResty

Prateek

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

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Detailed Comparison

Kong	OpenResty
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.	OpenResty (aka. ngx_openresty) is a full-fledged web application server by bundling the standard Nginx core, lots of 3rd-party Nginx modules, as well as most of their external dependencies.
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 42.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 671	Stacks 2.3K
Followers 1.5K	Followers 227
Votes 139	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 37 Easy to maintain 32 Easy to install 26 Flexible 21 Great performance 7 Api blueprint	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Cassandra Docker Prometheus Kubernetes PostgreSQL NGINX Vagrant	NGINX

What are some alternatives to Kong, OpenResty?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

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.

Tyk Cloud

Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.

Related Comparisons

Kong vs OpenResty: What are the differences?

Performance: Kong is built on top of OpenResty, but it adds additional features and functionalities to enhance performance. Kong provides a high-performance API gateway with built-in load balancing and caching capabilities. It uses a hybrid event-driven and threaded architecture to efficiently handle a large number of requests simultaneously. On the other hand, OpenResty is a web platform that embeds the Lua programming language into NGINX, allowing developers to extend NGINX with custom Lua scripts. While OpenResty can also achieve high performance, it requires writing custom Lua code to implement advanced functionalities.
Plugin Ecosystem: Kong boasts a comprehensive plugin ecosystem, offering a wide range of pre-built plugins that can be easily integrated into API gateway workflows. These plugins enable functionalities such as authentication, rate limiting, request and response transformations, and logging. OpenResty, on the other hand, does not have a built-in plugin ecosystem. Developers need to write custom Lua scripts or leverage existing Lua libraries to implement similar functionalities.
Administration and Configuration: Kong provides a user-friendly administration API and web interface, making it easy for developers and administrators to manage the API gateway and configure its various components. It offers fine-grained control over routing, request/response transformations, and security policies through a declarative configuration approach. OpenResty, being an extension of NGINX, relies on NGINX's configuration language and requires manual configuration file editing to manage the server and its components.
Enterprise Support: Kong offers enterprise-grade support through its commercial offering, Kong Enterprise. This includes features like professional support, on-premises installations, and enterprise plugins specifically designed for large-scale deployments. OpenResty, on the other hand, does not have a commercial offering and mainly relies on community support.
Logging and Analytics: Kong provides built-in logging and analytics capabilities, enabling developers and administrators to monitor and analyze API traffic. It supports various log storage and analysis providers, making it easier to integrate with existing monitoring and analytics systems. OpenResty, being an extension of NGINX, relies on NGINX's logging capabilities that require manual configuration and may require additional tools or scripts for log analysis.
Ease of Deployment: Kong offers various deployment options, including on-premises, cloud, and Kubernetes-based deployments. It provides pre-built Docker images and Helm charts for easy setup and configuration in containerized environments. OpenResty, being a web platform, can be deployed in similar environments but requires manual setup and configuration, potentially involving more effort.

Kong vs OpenResty

Overview