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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.
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 lapses, Tyk Operator and the rest of your Tyk system keep running and existing APIs keep serving traffic; only creating or updating APIs is blocked until the license is renewed. 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. Tyk Operator 1.6 adds Kubernetes Gateway API support: you can route traffic through your Tyk Gateways with the standard GatewayClass, Gateway and HTTPRoute resources (with Tyk Dashboard), alongside Tyk's own custom resources (CRDs) for APIs and security policies. 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, the Tyk Developer Portal and Tyk's Enhanced success plan (support). 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: each environment you run (production, staging and so on) counts, and so does each data centre it runs in; it fits enterprises with high or unpredictable traffic that need a predictable annual spend. Support is part of every paid plan, and customers rate it highly. Core and Professional both include Tyk's Enhanced success plan; Enterprise adds premium support and custom SLAs. Customers rate Tyk 4.8 out of 5 for Service & Support on Gartner Peer Insights, and 4.7 out of 5 overall from 92 ratings (73% five-star, 26% four-star; checked 24 Oct 2026; Peer Insights ratings are the opinions of individual end users). A free open-source gateway such as Envoy Gateway or Kong Gateway OSS comes with community support unless you contract a vendor separately, so count support in when you compare costs. 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). Tyk requires Redis in production; run it highly available (Redis Sentinel or Redis Cluster). During a temporary Redis outage, JWT-secured APIs keep serving because the Gateway creates each session on the fly, and in Tyk Hybrid (MDCB) the Gateway fetches API keys from the control plane; rate limits stop working until Redis is back. This is disaster-recovery behaviour, not a way to run without Redis. On Tyk Cloud, Tyk runs Redis and handles disaster recovery for you. 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
This page shows which features each edition and deployment option includes. For prices and plans, see Tyk pricing.

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Editions

Tyk has two editions:
  • Community Edition is free and open source. You run it on your own infrastructure.
  • Enterprise Edition requires a license from Tyk. It adds management components such as Tyk Dashboard and the Tyk Developer Portal, along with enterprise features for Tyk Gateway and Tyk AI Studio. It has three deployment options: Self-Managed, Tyk Cloud and Hybrid.
For the license of each component and how to get the Enterprise features, see Tyk Stack.

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Deployment Options

Tyk has three deployment options for the Enterprise Edition:
  • Self-Managed: the Enterprise Edition on your own infrastructure. You install Tyk Dashboard with a license and the tykio/tyk-gateway-ee image. See Install Tyk Self-Managed.
  • Tyk Cloud: Tyk runs the control plane and the Cloud Data Planes for you. See Tyk Cloud.
  • Hybrid: Tyk runs the control plane in Tyk Cloud. You run the gateways on your own infrastructure. See Hybrid Gateways.

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Feature Availability

The feature tables compare the Community Edition with the three Enterprise Edition deployment options.
  • Community Edition: the open source Tyk Gateway (tykio/tyk-gateway) and Tyk Pump on your own infrastructure. There is no Tyk Dashboard and no license. See Tyk Open Source.
  • Self-Managed, Tyk Cloud and Hybrid: the Enterprise Edition, with Tyk Dashboard and the Enterprise features of Tyk Gateway.

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Protocols

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MCP Gateway

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Client Authentication

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Upstream Authentication

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Access and Traffic Control

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Routing and Transformation

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Custom Processing via Plugins

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Observability

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Integration with Secrets Managers

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Tyk Dashboard

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Developer Portal

This table lists the main capabilities of the Tyk Developer Portal. The Developer Portal license enables all of them. Individual capabilities do not need separate claims. For more information, see Tyk Developer Portal.

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Multi-Region and Automation

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Tyk AI Studio

Tyk AI Studio has its own Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The following table compares the features available in Tyk AI Studio’s Community and Enterprise editions. For how to get each edition, see Tyk AI Studio Licensing and Editions.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Tyk Gateway is open source under MPL 2.0. You can use the tykio/tyk-gateway image in production with no license. Some features, such as upstream OAuth, token exchange and Tyk Streams, are only in the Enterprise build (tykio/tyk-gateway-ee).
No. Tyk Dashboard is closed source and needs a license. You can get a trial license from the Tyk website.
No. Tyk Developer Portal needs its own license and a connection to Tyk Dashboard.
Yes, for MCP proxies to a remote MCP server. A REST API to MCP proxy, upstream OAuth and token exchange need the Enterprise Edition. See MCP Gateway.
Yes. Tyk AI Studio Community Edition is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL 3.0). You can use it in production with no license.Enterprise features, such as budget enforcement, SSO and the audit trail, need an AI Studio Enterprise license.

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