1 - Steel tongue drums
What steel tongue drums are, who makes the well known ones, and how they compare to a handpan as an instrument and as a purchase.
REL-01What is a steel tongue drum, and how does it differ from a handpan?#
beginner
Short answer. A steel tongue drum is a hollow steel vessel with tongues cut into its surface with a slot cutter, each tongue tuned to a pitch. A handpan has no cuts at all: its notes are hammered dimples in an unbroken shell. That single difference in construction drives almost every difference in sound, price and playability.
On a handpan, a note is a shallow dome pressed into a continuous sheet of steel and then tuned so that its fundamental, octave and octave-plus-fifth all line up. The tone field is under tension from the shell around it, and it is coupled to the air inside the two glued half shells, which behaves as a Helmholtz resonator. That coupling is what gives a handpan its bloom and its harmonic complexity, and it is also why handpans are hard to build.
On a tongue drum, the maker cuts a slot in a pattern (usually a spiral, a horseshoe or a keyhole) so that a strip of steel is anchored at one end and free along its edges. The tongue then vibrates rather like the tine of a music box or a kalimba. Pitch is set by the length, width and thickness of the tongue, and tuned by grinding metal away from the free end (raises pitch) or from the root (lowers it). Some designs add magnets or removable weights instead.
The practical consequences:
- Harmonics. A well made handpan note is a tuned chord in itself. A tongue is much closer to a single pitch with an inharmonic ring. Some makers (Guda, RAV) work hard to bring an octave and higher partials into the tongue, and the better ones genuinely get there, but the effect is different rather than equivalent.
- Sustain and decay. Tongues tend to ring longer and blur more. Handpan notes decay faster and articulate more cleanly, which is why fast playing is clearer on a handpan.
- Volume and dynamics. A handpan has more dynamic range and responds to touch across a wider span. A tongue drum compresses more.
- Robustness. Tongue drums are far harder to knock out of tune, because the tongue is mechanically isolated by the cut.
- Price. Cutting and grinding tongues is quicker and more repeatable than hammering and tuning a shell. Tongue drums are correspondingly cheaper.
See also: REL-02, REL-13
REL-02What is a RAV Vast, and is it a handpan?#
beginner
Short answer. The RAV Vast is a high end steel tongue drum, not a handpan. It was designed by the Russian engineer Andrey Remyannikov and first appeared around 2013. It is the tongue drum that gets closest to a handpan’s harmonic richness, but the notes are still cut tongues.
The RAV came out of Remyannikov’s attempt to combine the melodic depth of a Hang with the forgiving playability of a tongue drum. The signature move is the tuning of the tongue itself. RAV’s own material describes later generations as carrying up to seven audible overtones per tongue, achieved partly through internal tuning work on the underside of the shell as well as the usual external grinding. Compared with a budget tongue drum, a RAV sounds far less like a struck bar and far more like a bell with a body behind it.
The standard instrument is around 51 cm (20 inches) across with nine tongues plus a central note, and it is sold in a long list of named scales rather than in the raw note lists you sometimes see from handpan makers. RAV has run through several design generations; the visible changes have been the move to the current tongue layout, the addition of internal tuning, and a shift from a hydrophobic coating to a more durable painted finish. There have also been thicker steel variants sold under a “2” suffix and a separate RAV Pan line. Because the model naming has changed over the years, check what the current line-up actually is with the maker rather than trusting an old review.
Is it a handpan? No, and RAV do not claim it is. It is worth being precise, because a lot of shops list RAVs under a “handpan” heading and buyers arrive expecting a handpan’s articulation. What you get instead is a sustained, resonant, quite reverberant instrument that rewards slower, more atmospheric playing and is much more tolerant of being hit with mallets or with the flat of the hand. Many players own both and use them for different jobs.
Price sits well above a typical tongue drum and well below most handpans, which is exactly the gap it was built for.
See also: REL-05, REL-06
REL-03Guda, Hapi, Zenko, Idiopan and Beat Root: what is each one?#
beginner
Short answer. They are five separate brands of steel tongue drum, not five types of instrument. Each is a company with its own construction, materials and price bracket, and knowing which is which stops you comparing a 100 pound toy with a 900 pound instrument.
Guda. Founded by Dmitrii Gubarev and sold through guda-drum.com and gudadrum.com. Guda describe their instruments as a hybrid of tongue drum and handpan, and the tongue geometry is deliberately complex so that octave harmonics are present in the sound. The range is wide: Guda 2.0 and its Plus and Fx variants, Guda Double (two tuned sides), Guda Ortus, Guda Coin, Guda Freezbee and Guda Neo, in stainless steel, brass and aluminium, usually with heavy decorative etching. Several models take internal or external pickups. Note that the brand has been produced in eastern Europe and the corporate location has shifted over the years, so buy from the official site rather than assuming a country of origin.
HAPI. An American brand, trading since 2008 from Oakhurst, California. HAPI use a proprietary steel alloy around 2 mm thick with rubber isolation feet and a bottom sound port. The range runs from the tiny Tini and Trinity at under 150 US dollars up through Mini, Aura, Slim, Origin and Omni at a few hundred, mostly in pentatonic tunings. HAPI also sell an instrument they market as a handpan, which muddies the naming; check the construction, not the product name.
Zenko. Made by Metal Sounds in France from stainless steel. The same workshop makes the Spacedrum handpan, so Zenko is one of the few tongue drums built by a company that also builds handpans. Typically nine notes, sold with a bag and sticks, aimed squarely at the accessible end.
Idiopan. A product line from EnSoul Music Designs in the United States, made since around 2010, and unusual for being genuinely tunable by the owner using small magnets placed on the tongues. Models include Bella (6 inch, 6 notes), Lunabell (8 inch), Domina (12 inch), Dominus (14 inch) and the Dual-Tone, most available with a pickup.
Beat Root. A British brand best known for tongue drums with wooden bodies and steel tops, and for an electric model with a built in pickup. The wooden shell gives a warmer, drier voice than an all steel drum.
See also: REL-07
REL-04Do steel tongue drums go out of tune?#
beginner
Short answer. Far less readily than handpans, and for a different reason. A tongue is mechanically separated from the rest of the shell by its cut, so it does not carry the stored tension that makes a handpan note drift. In normal use, most tongue drums hold pitch for years.
The stability comes straight from the geometry. On a handpan, every tone field sits in a stressed membrane; hit one hard and you deform steel that is also holding its neighbours in shape, which is why a single heavy strike or a drop can move several notes. On a tongue drum, deforming a tongue takes a plastic bend of the tongue itself. That is much harder to do with a hand, and a mallet strike that would detune a handpan usually does nothing at all.
What does move a tongue drum’s tuning:
- Physical damage. A real bend from a fall, something heavy dropped on it, or standing on it.
- Corrosion at the root. Rust or pitting at the anchored end changes the tongue’s effective stiffness. This is the main long term risk on painted carbon steel drums that have been left damp.
- Added mass. Anything stuck to a tongue lowers its pitch. That is a defect if it is a sticker or a lump of tape and a feature if it is a tuning magnet.
- Temperature. Pitch shifts slightly with temperature on any steel instrument. It comes back.
Retuning is also more tractable than on a handpan. Because pitch is a function of the tongue’s free length and mass, a competent workshop adjusts it by grinding: material off the tip raises the pitch, material near the root lowers it. This is destructive and irreversible, so it is a job for the maker, not for a file in your kitchen. Idiopan is the exception by design, since its magnet system lets the owner move pitches around and undo the change by taking the magnet off.
One caveat worth knowing: cheap unbranded drums are frequently sold poorly tuned from new, and “my tongue drum is out of tune” is much more often a manufacturing shortfall than drift. Check the instrument against a tuner in the first week, not the first year.
See also: MYT-10
REL-05Is a tongue drum a good cheaper way to start?#
beginner
Short answer. It is a good way to find out whether you enjoy playing a melodic hand percussion instrument, and a poor way to learn handpan technique. Buy one because you want a tongue drum, not as a rehearsal for something else.
The honest case for it. Handpans cost from roughly 1,000 to 3,000 euros or more, and that is a real amount of money to spend on a guess. A 150 to 400 euro tongue drum answers several useful questions cheaply: do you like sitting with an instrument in your lap for an hour, do you find pentatonic and minor scales satisfying or limiting, do you actually reach for it in the evening, and does your household tolerate the sound. Those questions matter more than most people expect, and plenty of would-be handpan buyers discover the answer is no.
The honest case against it. The physical skills do not transfer as directly as the shape suggests. Handpan playing lives on a fast, light, rebounding touch on a small target with precise damping. Tongue drums reward a broader contact and a slower phrase, and they are far more forgiving of an inaccurate strike because the target is a long strip rather than a small dome. Several months on a tongue drum can leave you with habits that a handpan teacher then has to undo, particularly a heavy hand and a tendency to let everything ring.
A more useful way to think about it. If your budget will reach a handpan within a year, save. If it will not, or if you genuinely want the tongue drum’s sustained, bell-like character, buy one and enjoy it as its own instrument. The middle option is the RAV Vast or a good Guda: expensive for a tongue drum but musically substantial, and unlikely to feel like a stepping stone you outgrow in a month.
One thing not to do is buy the cheapest unbranded drum you can find and let it decide the question. A badly tuned drum with dead tongues will convince you that you dislike the whole category when what you dislike is that particular object.
See also: REL-07
REL-06Can you play handpan technique on a tongue drum?#
intermediate
Short answer. Some of it. The rhythmic hand vocabulary transfers reasonably well. The parts that depend on a handpan’s fast decay, precise tone field and shell resonance mostly do not, and forcing them produces a muddy result.
What transfers. Alternating hand patterns, ghost notes, the basic thumb and fingertip alternation, ostinato left hand under a melodic right hand, and the general habit of thinking in a scale laid out around a circle. The layout logic is similar enough that a handpan player picks up a tongue drum quickly and vice versa. Slaps and rim work on the shell also transfer, though the shell tone is different.
What does not. Three things in particular.
Damping. On a handpan you shorten a note by resting a finger, a knuckle or the heel of the hand on the tone field, and the note stops almost immediately because it is a small stiff dimple. A tongue rings on. You can damp it, but you need to press the tongue itself, often with more contact and more anticipation, and rapid alternation between ringing and damped notes is genuinely harder.
Speed and clarity. Handpan rolls stay legible because notes decay quickly. Run the same roll on a tongue drum and the sustain of each tongue accumulates into a wash. On sustained instruments like the RAV that wash is the point, so players adapt by phrasing more sparsely rather than by playing faster.
Touch on the tone field. Handpan players learn to place strikes at specific points on a dimple to bring out the fundamental, the octave or the compound fifth. A tongue’s harmonic content is far less steerable by strike position, though hitting the tip versus the root does change the tone.
What tongue drums add. Mallets are normal rather than controversial, and good mallet playing on a tongue drum is a real technique with its own repertoire. Palm strikes near the tongue root produce a bass thump that most handpans cannot do. And because tongue drums are hard to detune, you can play with a force that would be reckless on a handpan.
The sensible summary is that they are cousins, not the same instrument with different skins. Play each one for what it is good at.
See also: REL-01
REL-07Which should a beginner actually buy?#
beginner
Short answer. Decide what you want the instrument to sound like before you decide what to spend. If you want the clear, articulate, harmonically stacked handpan voice, nothing else will satisfy you and you should save for a handpan. If you want a resonant, sustained, meditative wash, a good tongue drum is not a compromise, it is the right instrument.
Working through it in order.
First, listen with a specific test. Find recordings of a handpan and a tongue drum playing something fast and something slow. Most people can hear immediately that they prefer one. The slow test tells you about tone; the fast test tells you about articulation, and articulation is where the two diverge most.
Second, be realistic about budget and time. A handpan from an established maker is typically 1,000 to 3,000 euros or more, and directories such as Master The Handpan list around a hundred makers with delivery times ranging from a couple of weeks to over a year. That range means the old picture of universal multi-year waiting lists is out of date, but it also means the specific instrument you want may not be available quickly.
Third, if you are going tongue drum, match the brand to the budget. Under about 200 euros you are in HAPI’s smaller models, Zenko’s entry instruments and a large field of unbranded drums of highly variable tuning quality. Around 250 to 500 you get better tuned instruments with usable harmonics. Above that, a RAV Vast or a higher Guda model buys genuinely different musical territory.
Fourth, prefer a scale you can hear yourself using. Whatever the instrument, the scale is a bigger constraint on your playing than the brand. A minor or Celtic tuning is a safe first choice because it sounds settled with almost any note order. Avoid buying a dramatic exotic scale as a first instrument on the strength of one video.
Fifth, buy from the maker or an authorised dealer. Both categories have a heavy counterfeit and rebadging problem, and both have brands whose product names deliberately blur the line.
What not to do: do not buy a handpan sight unheard from a marketplace listing because it is cheap, and do not buy a tongue drum expecting it to become a handpan later.
See also: REL-12, Buying section
2 - The wider family
The steelpan the handpan descends from, PANArt’s later instruments, the early named models, the clay pot ancestors, and everything else that gets mistaken for a handpan.
beginner
Short answer. The steelpan is the tuned percussion instrument developed in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1930s and 1940s from discarded oil barrels. The handpan is a direct technical descendant: PANArt were steelpan builders first, and the note-in-a-sunken-steel-sheet principle comes straight from Trinidad.
The steelpan story begins with the percussion bands of Trinidadian carnival, which moved from bamboo tubes to biscuit tins, paint cans and dustbin lids, and then to the 55 gallon oil drums that arrived in quantity with the oil industry and the wartime American bases. Elliott “Ellie” Mannette (1927 to 2018) is widely credited as the father of the modern steelpan, and two of his innovations matter directly here. He was the first to use the 55 gallon oil barrel, and he sank the drum head into a concave bowl rather than leaving it convex, which created room for more notes and separated them acoustically so that one note stopped exciting its neighbours. Mannette moved to the United States in the early 1960s, built steel bands in hundreds of American schools and universities, and from 1991 ran a tuning project at West Virginia University that trained a generation of pan builders.
The link to the handpan runs through Switzerland. Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer of PANArt in Bern were steelpan makers who had been developing their own sheet steel for pan building since the mid 1990s, including a nitrided deep-drawn steel they called Pang. When they built the Hang in 2000, they applied the steelpan’s note-making method to a completely different body: two hemispheres glued into a closed vessel with a tuned air cavity, played with the hands rather than with rubber tipped sticks.
So the family relationship is real but not superficial. Both instruments make a note by shaping and stressing a patch of sheet steel and tuning its partials with a hammer. Everything else differs: the steelpan is convex-notes-in-a-concave-bowl struck with sticks, usually in an ensemble of pans covering different registers, tuned chromatically and loud enough for carnival. The handpan is convex, hand played, closed, quiet and usually confined to a single scale.
Going deeper. Calling a handpan a “steel drum” is not simply wrong, it is imprecise in a way that erases a specific national instrument with a documented history and a living tradition. Most steelpan players find it grating.
See also: REL-09, MYT-15
REL-09What is the Gubal, and what else has PANArt built since the Hang?#
intermediate
Short answer. The Gubal is a hand played steel vessel PANArt introduced in summer 2013, for the company’s twentieth anniversary, with a large central resonance opening on the top that lets the player drive the air cavity directly for a strong bass. It is the flagship of the Pang family, the group of instruments PANArt turned to after ending Hang production in December 2013.
The Gubal’s defining feature is its acoustics. Where a Hang has a central Ding note and a Gu port underneath, the Gubal has the resonance opening on the playing surface: a round hole with an inward-facing neck, surrounded by an elastic area PANArt call the Ringding. Striking or pressing that area excites the Helmholtz resonance of the enclosed air far more strongly than is possible on a Hang. A hemispherical extension on the underside, the Gugel, gives a bass pitch around 78 Hz (E flat 2), and the player alters that bass by changing hand position over the opening. Around the Ringding sits a ring of seven tone fields in the familiar arrangement. Practically, it means one player can produce both a bass line and a melody, which a Hang cannot.
The Gubal was conceived for ensemble play rather than as the intimate solo instrument the Hang had become. That created a balance problem, since it is loud, and PANArt responded by building companions: the Hang Gudu (2015), the Hang Urgu (2016), the Hang Bal, and a set of three Pang string instruments. Collectively PANArt call the resulting practice Pang music, an improvised ensemble form, and they present it as the point of the whole exercise rather than as a product line.
All of these are made from Pang, PANArt’s own nitrided deep-drawn sheet steel, originally developed in the mid 1990s for steelpan making.
The important context for buyers: PANArt no longer make the Hang, have not since the end of 2013, and are not going to resume. They have also consistently resisted being treated as a supplier to the handpan market. If you want a PANArt instrument today, you are buying into their current work, not a Hang.
See also: REL-08, MYT-01
REL-10What is the Halo, and why do early handpans have their own model names?#
intermediate
Short answer. The Halo is the instrument built by Pantheon Steel in Missouri, first delivered in summer 2009, and it is where the word “handpan” comes from. Early makers gave their instruments distinct names because PANArt had trademarked “Hang” and nobody could legally use it.
Kyle Cox of Pantheon Steel appears to have coined “hand pan” between June and September 2007, on the company’s own website, to describe the Hang-like instrument he was developing. Internet Archive snapshots place the term’s first appearance in that window. It spread through the Hang-Music Forum from September 2007 and was cemented when handpan.org launched on 11 August 2009 as the community’s main forum. Within a few years it had become the generic English term for the whole instrument family, which is how a single maker’s product description became a category name.
That naming pressure explains the odd variety of model names from the first wave of makers. Because “Hang” was off limits, each builder had to invent something: Pantheon Steel’s Halo, Metal Sounds’ Spacedrum in France, Bill Brown’s Caisa in Germany (a steel top over a wooden horn base, played with the hands but distinctly its own thing), Bali Steel Pan in Indonesia, and later Ayasa in the Netherlands and many others. Some of those names have stuck as brand names for what everyone now calls a handpan. A few, like the Caisa, describe an instrument different enough that the separate name still earns its keep.
The word “pantam” arose from the same problem in a different language community. Israeli players and makers, working in a scene that grew quickly in the 2010s, use pantam as the standard term. It is a handpan by any technical definition. If you see a maker or a shop using pantam, it is a regional naming convention, not a claim about a different instrument.
Going deeper. The naming history is worth knowing because it is the main reason online searches are so confusing. “Hang drum” is what PANArt asked people not to say, “handpan” is a competitor’s marketing term that became the standard, “pantam” is the Hebrew-language equivalent, and half a dozen model names are brands rather than categories.
See also: MYT-01, History section
REL-11What are the udu and the ghatam, and are they handpan ancestors?#
beginner
Short answer. They are clay pot drums, the udu from the Igbo people of Nigeria and the ghatam from South India. They are not ancestors of the handpan in any lineage sense, but they are the closest older relatives in acoustic principle: a struck vessel whose enclosed air is part of the instrument.
The udu. Ùdù means vessel or pot in Igbo, and the instrument began as a water jug with an extra hole cut in its side. It is classified as both an idiophone and a plosive aerophone, because two quite different sounds come out of it. Striking the clay body with fingers gives dry, pitched taps in the manner of any pot drum. Striking or slapping across the side hole displaces a slug of air and excites the Helmholtz resonance of the vessel, producing the deep, swooping “whoop” the udu is known for; the pitch of that bass bends as the player opens and closes the mouth of the pot with the other hand. Traditionally it was played by Igbo women in ceremonial contexts. Modern udus are made in clay, and also in fibreglass and other materials.
The ghatam. A clay pot from the Indian subcontinent, central to Carnatic percussion and one of the oldest instruments in the region. The name comes from the Sanskrit ghaṭa, pot. The clay is mixed with brass or copper filings and a little iron, which is why a good ghatam rings rather than thuds; the Manamadurai variety from Tamil Nadu is thick and heavy with brass shards in the body and is prized for a sharp metallic ring. The player sits cross legged with the mouth of the pot against the abdomen and strikes the outside with fingers, thumbs, palms and heels; pressing the mouth against the belly and releasing it produces the bass, again by controlling the air cavity.
The handpan connection. A handpan is also a closed vessel with a tuned air cavity, and its Gu port on the underside is doing the same acoustic job as the udu’s side hole. What the handpan does not inherit is any of the tuning method, the playing tradition or the repertoire. The Helmholtz resonator is a piece of physics that many cultures found independently, not a chain of transmission. Claiming otherwise is where a lot of the “ancient instrument” mythology starts.
See also: MYT-06, Acoustics section
REL-12Where do the cheap “hang drums” on Amazon and AliExpress fit?#
beginner
Short answer. Almost all of them are budget steel tongue drums listed under the wrong name for search traffic. A smaller number are genuinely handpan-shaped instruments of poor quality, sometimes outright copies of a named maker’s design.
Search “hang drum” on a large marketplace and the results are dominated by 10 to 14 inch coloured steel domes at 30 to 120 euros, usually sold with two rubber mallets and a padded bag. Look at the photographs: if the notes are visible as cut slots radiating from the centre, it is a tongue drum, whatever the listing says. The listings use “hang drum”, “handpan”, “hand pan drum” and “tank drum” more or less interchangeably because those are the terms buyers type, and marketplace search rewards whoever stuffs the most of them into a title.
The second category is more of a problem. There are workshops producing convex, unbroken-shell instruments at a few hundred euros that are genuinely handpans by construction, and which are usually poorly tuned, harmonically thin, and unstable. Some are sold under invented brand names, some are direct visual clones of established makers’ work down to the logo. The community term for these is “pandrums” or simply fakes, and they are the main reason experienced players tell beginners to buy from a maker or an authorised dealer.
How to tell what you are actually looking at, from a listing:
- Cut slots visible on the surface. Tongue drum. Fine as a tongue drum, judge it on tongue drum terms.
- Smooth dimples, no cuts, price under about 500 euros. Treat with real scepticism. Ask for a recording of the actual instrument, not a stock video.
- No named maker, no workshop location, no scale specified beyond “D minor”. Walk away.
- Stock photography reused across many “brands”. Common. Reverse image search the listing photo.
None of this makes the cheap tongue drums bad objects. A 60 euro drum can be a genuinely enjoyable thing to have on a coffee table, and some are tuned adequately. The failure mode is expectation: someone buys a 60 euro “hang drum”, finds it sounds nothing like the video that made them want one, and concludes the instrument is overrated.
See also: REL-13, REL-07
REL-13What is the difference between a handpan, a hank drum and a propane tank drum?#
beginner
Short answer. A hank drum is a specific thing: the homemade steel tongue drum Dennis Havlena made from an empty propane tank in February 2007, and the design he published for free. “Tank drum” is the looser term for the same idea. A handpan is a different instrument entirely, with hammered notes and no cuts.
Havlena’s build is one of the genuinely important moments in this whole story. He took a 20 pound propane tank, burned off the paint, cut seven to ten radial tongues into the tank’s base, and tuned them by filing. He borrowed the physical form from Felle Vega’s Tambiro and the note arrangement from the Hang, and he named the result by fusing “Hang” and “tank” into hank drum. Crucially, he published the plans openly. Jim Doble’s Whale Drum (1990) had explored similar territory earlier, and wooden slit drums go back to many independent traditions, but Havlena’s free plans are what turned the idea into a worldwide DIY movement and then into a commercial category.
The terminology as people actually use it:
- Hank drum. Strictly, Havlena’s propane tank design or a homemade drum following it. Loosely, any homemade steel tongue drum.
- Tank drum. Any tongue drum made from or resembling a repurposed gas tank. Often used as a general synonym for a budget steel tongue drum, especially in European shop listings.
- Steel tongue drum. The neutral umbrella term covering all of them, homemade or commercial. This is the term to use if you want to be understood.
- Handpan. Not in this family. Hammered tone fields in an unbroken shell, two glued half shells, no cuts.
The DIY route is still viable and still cheap. A used propane tank, an angle grinder with a thin cutting disc, a chromatic tuner and patience will get you a playable instrument in a weekend, and the results range from charming to genuinely good. Purging the tank properly before cutting is not optional; residual propane and a cutting disc is a serious hazard, and the standard practice is to fill with water before any cutting begins. Nobody builds a handpan this way. Handpan shells require deep drawing or extensive hammer forming, heat treatment, and hundreds of hours of tuning skill.
See also: REL-01, Making and tuning section
REL-14Which instruments get confused with the handpan?#
beginner
Short answer. Singing bowls, gongs, kalimbas and the glass harp turn up constantly in the same playlists, the same sound bath sessions and the same search results, but none of them shares the handpan’s construction or playing technique. They are grouped by mood, not by family.
Singing bowls. Standing bowls, usually bronze alloy, played by striking with a mallet or by running a wooden puja stick around the rim to sustain a tone by friction. Acoustically they are quite unlike a handpan: their partials are strongly inharmonic and they are usually not tuned to a scale in any exact sense, despite widespread marketing claims about specific frequencies and chakras. Handpans and bowls do share a market and often share a stage, which is most of why they are conflated.
Gongs. Large flat or bossed metal discs, struck with a soft beater, characterised by a slow rising wash and a huge spectrum of inharmonic partials. There is a small genuine relationship, in that gong makers and handpan makers both work sheet metal and both care about hammer-controlled tension, but the sound and the playing are unrelated.
Kalimba (mbira, thumb piano). African lamellophone: tuned metal tines mounted on a board or a resonating box, plucked with the thumbs. The interesting point is that a kalimba tine and a steel tongue drum tongue are the same physical object, a cantilever bar fixed at one end. So the kalimba is genuinely close to a tongue drum, and genuinely far from a handpan.
Glass harp and glass harmonica. Tuned glass vessels or spinning glass bowls sounded by a wet finger. Near-pure tones with very little attack, hence the overlap in atmosphere with a handpan playing softly. No construction or technique in common at all.
Why the confusion persists. All of these are melodic, resonant, sustaining, played without a keyboard or frets, and heavily used in ambient, meditative and sound therapy contexts. Streaming playlists and shop categories group by listening context, so the algorithms keep them adjacent. If you came to the handpan through one of these, it is worth listening to some of the more rhythmic, percussive handpan playing before you buy, because that side of the instrument is the part the ambient playlists hide.
See also: REL-01, MYT-03