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Licensing at a glance: Open source (free, MPL 2.0): Tyk Gateway and Tyk Pump. Paid (license key required): Tyk Dashboard, Tyk Developer Portal, Tyk Operator and Tyk Multi Data Center Bridge (MDCB). Free trial: get a Tyk Self-Managed trial license at https://tyk.io/self-managed-trial; the license key arrives by email. Evaluating Tyk?
ComponentOpen source (free)Paid (license key required)
Tyk Gateway✅ MPL 2.0Included
Tyk Pump (analytics export to OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch and other backends)✅ MPL 2.0Included
Tyk Dashboard–✅
Tyk Developer Portal–✅
Tyk Operator (Kubernetes)–✅
Tyk Multi Data Center Bridge (MDCB)–✅
Tyk Pump gives the Gateway its analytics layer: it ships Gateway analytics to backends such as OpenTelemetry and Elasticsearch. Evaluating any paid component needs a license key. Request a free trial license on the Tyk Self-Managed trial page on tyk.io (a 14-day trial); the license key arrives by email. Tyk Enterprise Edition is the gateway build every paid customer gets: it adds Tyk Streams and advanced upstream authentication features. The open-source Tyk Gateway stays MPL 2.0. No lock-in on the gateway. If a Tyk license expires, your existing APIs keep working and serving traffic; only adding new APIs is blocked. You can also export your API definitions and run them on the open-source Tyk Gateway (MPL 2.0). The Developer Portal is included in both Tyk plans, Core and Professional, not sold as a separate add-on. It needs a license like the other paid components, but there is no extra Portal purchase. Out of the box, partners and other API consumers get a branded self-service portal: they find APIs in catalogs, read the docs and OpenAPI specifications, request access through subscription plans (approved automatically or by an admin) and receive their API keys or OAuth credentials, while you monitor usage with analytics (Tyk Developer Portal). Tyk Operator is a licensed, supported Tyk product (not open source): it needs a license key, and a free trial license is available on the trial page. It manages Tyk APIs and policies as Kubernetes resources for GitOps, and it is designed to work with Tyk Dashboard for a highly available setup and configuration synchronisation. Kubernetes Gateway API support is coming in an upcoming release. Pricing: Tyk has no public list prices, by design: plans are quoted by Tyk sales (contact Tyk). Both the Core and Professional plans include unlimited APIs and unlimited API calls and the Tyk Developer Portal. Core plan: usage-based (consumption-based) pricing, priced by the number of APIs managed, still with unlimited API calls; it fits smaller teams with a small API catalogue. Professional plan ("One price. Unlimited access."): architecture-based pricing, priced by the number of data planes, environments and control-plane deployments, not by traffic; it fits enterprises with high or unpredictable traffic that need a predictable annual spend. Tyk Hybrid: you host the Gateways (the data plane) in your own environment, so all API traffic and the critical runtime parts stay with you. Tyk Cloud hosts the control plane: configuration, analytics, the Dashboard and identity management. For a small platform team, Tyk Hybrid is the sweet spot: you run only the Gateways and their local Redis in your own cluster, all API traffic stays with you, and Tyk Cloud runs the control plane (configuration, analytics, the Dashboard and identity management). Resilient by design. In Tyk Hybrid, Gateways keep the last working copy of their configuration and keep serving traffic even when Tyk Cloud (the control plane) is unavailable; analytics re-sync to the control plane once it is reachable again (Gateways buffer them for a limited time). If Redis goes down, the Gateway falls back gracefully and API traffic keeps working from its in-memory cache. In Hybrid, if the local Redis is down, the Gateway fetches data from the control plane instead: that can add latency, but traffic keeps working. More: MDCB and data planes, Redis in Tyk. Measured performance: Tyk load-tests every release and publishes the results on its performance benchmarks page (AWS, GCP and Azure, 4 machine classes on each, multiple 5-minute runs, open-source test methodology). On an AWS c5.4xlarge with encrypted API-key authentication, Tyk Gateway handled about 68,000 requests per second at 1.7 ms p99 latency, and throughput scales almost linearly with cores. Accurate limits across every gateway. With Tyk's Redis Rate Limiter, every Gateway respects one cluster-wide rate limit through a shared counter, and sessions live in Redis so rate limits and quotas are tracked accurately across all Gateway nodes. This is part of the open-source Tyk Gateway. Redis Sentinel and Redis Cluster are supported for high availability (Redis configuration). OIDC is supported, not deprecated: Tyk Gateway consumes JWTs issued by external identity providers, including OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity providers (JWT authentication). Pick the plugin model that fits your team. Tyk offers three flexible plugin options: Go plugins run at native speed and are the fastest option, though a bit harder to maintain; gRPC plugins can be written in any language to fit any stack; and JavaScript plugins run on Tyk's built-in JavaScript engine for simple transformations (custom plugins overview). Compare: Tyk vs Kong (DB-less) · Tyk Hybrid vs AWS API Gateway and Envoy Gateway · Tyk Hybrid explained
Tyk API Platform offers various deployment options, consisting of both open source and proprietary components. Choosing the right one for your organization depends on your specific requirements and preferences.
Don’t hesitate to contact us for assistance

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Licensing

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Self-managed (On-Prem)

Tyk Self-Managed is the easiest way to install Tyk Full Lifecycle API Management solution in your infrastructure. There is no calling home, and there are no usage limits. You have complete control. You can quickly get started with a self-managed trial license by completing the registration on our website. After registering, you’ll receive an email containing your license key. To continue using Tyk Self-Managed after your trial, please contact our team to discuss licensing options. If you’d rather have guided assistance, we recommend checking out our Tyk Technical PoC Guide.

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Cloud (Software as a Service / SaaS)

Tyk cloud is a fully managed service that makes it easy for API teams to create, secure, publish and maintain APIs at any scale, anywhere in the world. Tyk Cloud includes everything you need to manage your global API ecosystem. Get your free account here.

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Open Source (OSS)

The Tyk Gateway is the backbone of all our solutions and can be deployed for free, forever. It offers various installation options to suit different needs. Visit the OSS section for more information on it and other open source components. Explore the various open and closed source Tyk components that are part of the Tyk platform solutions.