acme.sh vs Kong Gateway
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted reverse proxy & gateways options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
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Compare acme.sh with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole mitmproxy Istio AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora authentik SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish Caddy Docker Proxy Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Compare Kong Gateway with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole mitmproxy Istio AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora authentik SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish Caddy Docker Proxy Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Feature acme.sh Kong Gateway Category Reverse Proxy & Gateways Reverse Proxy & Gateways License GPL-3.0 Apache-2.0 Language Shell Lua Setup difficulty Easy Medium Min. RAM 32 MB 512 MB Deployment binary, source docker, kubernetes, helm GitHub stars ★ 47,426 ★ 43,947 First released 2016 2015 Replaces Certbot AWS API Gateway, Apigee
Why pick each one
Choose acme.sh if… Released under the GPL-3.0 license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly Mature project with 47.4k GitHub stars Written in Shell acme.sh details Choose Kong Gateway if… Released under the Apache-2.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Kubernetes-ready with Helm charts available Mature project with 43.9k GitHub stars Kong Gateway details
Frequently asked questions Is acme.sh or Kong Gateway better? acme.sh is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Kong Gateway if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are acme.sh and Kong Gateway free and open-source? Yes. acme.sh is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Kong Gateway under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run acme.sh and Kong Gateway with Docker? acme.sh: check the project docs for container support. Kong Gateway: yes.