Part 11
Maturity and governance
This page records release, governance, and adoption facts with the time they were checked, and lists the gaps each project declares about itself.
After this page you can:
- Read the current release and API version of each project.
- Judge release cadence and API stability before committing to either project.
- List the features each project says it has not implemented.
Release and governance facts
These values change fastest. All were read from the GitHub REST API and project pages on 2026-10-01 at 17:00 AEST (Australia/Melbourne). Dates are converted to Australia/Melbourne.18
| Fact | ax (google/ax) | kagent (kagent-dev/kagent) |
|---|---|---|
| Repository created | ax: 2026-03-31 | kagent: 2025-01-2218 |
| Latest release | ax: v0.3.1, published 2026-09-25 23:25 AEST | kagent: v1.0.0-alpha6, published 2026-10-01 08:57 AEST18 |
| Stable line | ax: No stable release.1 | kagent: v0.10.2, published 2026-09-24 02:04 AEST18 |
| API version | ax: ax.io/v1alpha14 | kagent: api.kagent.dev/v1alpha3 (1.x)9 |
| Fact | ax (google/ax) | kagent (kagent-dev/kagent) |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ax: 12,711 | kagent: 3,89918 |
| License | ax: Apache-2.0 | kagent: Apache-2.018 |
| Governance | ax: a Google repository. The README warns it "will likely introduce major breaking changes prior to a stable release".1 | kagent: CNCF Sandbox project, accepted 2025-05-22.16 |
| OpenSSF Best Practices | ax: None linked from the README.1 | kagent: passing (project 10723). The badge entry was last updated on 2025-10-02, before the 1.x rewrite.17 |
Agent Substrate, which both projects need, is also Apache-2.0. Its v0.3.0 release was published on 2026-10-01 at 09:40 AEST.18 kagent alpha6 does not build against that release: its go.mod replaces upstream Substrate with the kagent-dev/substrate fork at v0.3.0-alpha3.30
Release cadence and API stability
kagent shipped v1.0.0-alpha3 to alpha6 between 2026-09-24 and 2026-10-01, four alphas in eight days. Inside that window, the API group changed from kagent.dev to api.kagent.dev and the Agent CRD replaced the earlier template selector.189 Substrate went from v0.1.0 to v0.3.0 between 2026-09-11 and 2026-10-01.18
The kagent.dev 1.x documentation still describes v1.0.0-alpha4, so commands and manifests copied from it do not work at alpha6.11 The kagent lab uses alpha6 syntax.
Self-declared gaps
Both projects list what they have not built. The table quotes each project's own docs.
| Area | ax (roadmap) | kagent (not implemented) |
|---|---|---|
| Lifecycle | ax: idleness detection and automatic suspension; stateful task branching.6 | kagent: checkpoint sharing.9 |
| Agents and delegation | ax: customization of the built-in bootstrap and coding agent harness.6 | kagent: Dedicated agent bindings; policy-enforced public cross-Session delegation.9 |
| Identity and scale | ax: SPIFFE identity for Tasks; least-privilege policies per actor.6 | kagent: multi-replica gateway coordination.9 |
| Observability | ax: OpenTelemetry metrics, traces, and trajectory collection.6 | kagent: OpenTelemetry tracing is documented as supported.8 |
kagent also notes that live Substrate settlement and the complete multi-replica rollout of Session lifecycle work remain acceptance work, and that the unreleased schema requires a clean database.10
Platform requirements
Substrate v0.3.0 documents only kind and GKE installs. The real requirement is that the cluster serves the certificates.k8s.io/v1beta1 PodCertificateRequest and ClusterTrustBundle APIs.1213 Kubernetes 1.36 or later is what Substrate's GKE guide documents, not a universal minimum: kagent's own kind setup runs Kubernetes 1.35.0 with the ClusterTrustBundle, ClusterTrustBundleProjection and PodCertificateRequest feature gates and the certificates.k8s.io/v1beta1 runtime-config enabled.34 Those APIs are beta and off by default.14 EKS does not enable beta APIs by default, so on managed clusters that cannot enable beta APIs or feature gates this is still a blocker.15 The Setup page covers how to check a cluster.