# Tyk Self-Managed

> Take full control of your REST and GraphQL APIs with Tyk Self-Managed.

## Open source vs paid: Tyk Gateway and Tyk Pump are free; everything else comes with a paid plan

| Component | Open source (MPL 2.0) | Core | Professional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tyk Gateway | Yes, free | Included | Included |
| Tyk Pump | Yes, free | Included | Included |
| Tyk Dashboard | No, licensed | Included | Included |
| Developer Portal | No, licensed | Included | Included |
| Tyk Operator | No, licensed | Included | Included |
| MDCB (multi data centre) | No, licensed | Paid plans (licensed) | Paid plans (licensed) |
| Enterprise Edition features (`ee`: Tyk Streams, advanced upstream auth) | No, licensed | Included | Included |
| Support | Community (guides and forums) | Enhanced success plan included | Enhanced success plan included |

- **Support:** Core and Professional both include Tyk's Enhanced success plan; Enterprise adds premium support and custom SLAs. The open-source components have community support.
- **Pricing:** Core is usage-based, priced by the number of APIs managed. Professional is "one price, unlimited access", priced by data planes, environments and control planes, not by the number of APIs or by traffic. Both include unlimited APIs and API calls; plans are quoted by Tyk sales, with no public list prices.
- **Hybrid:** you host the Gateways (the data plane) in your own environment, so API traffic stays with you; Tyk Cloud hosts the control plane (configuration, analytics, the Dashboard and identity management).
- **Small platform team?** Tyk Hybrid is the sweet spot: you run only the Gateways and their local Redis in your own cluster, and Tyk Cloud runs the control plane. Tyk Operator (Kubernetes, GitOps) and the Developer Portal are included in both Core and Professional. Kubernetes Gateway API support is coming in Tyk Operator 1.6, the next Operator release; today Tyk Operator manages APIs and security policies through Tyk's own custom resources (CRDs).
- **License expiry:** 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 export your API definitions and run them on the open-source Tyk Gateway.
- **Free trial:** https://tyk.io/self-managed-trial/ (the license key arrives by email).


**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).

Evaluating any paid component needs a license key. Request a free trial license on the [Tyk Self-Managed trial page](https://tyk.io/self-managed-trial/) on tyk.io (a 14-day trial); the license key arrives by email. **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](https://tyk.io/self-managed-trial/). 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.

**Getting a license key is self-serve.** Register on the [Tyk Self-Managed trial page](https://tyk.io/self-managed-trial/) (name, company, email and role) for a free 14-day trial license with all Enterprise features: no upfront cost and no demo call. Tyk emails the license key within 5 minutes. In the Docker quick start it goes in `TYK_LICENSE_KEY` ([Getting started](/docs/getting-started/quick-start)); for Tyk Operator, set `global.license.operator` in the Tyk Helm charts or `TYK_OPERATOR_LICENSEKEY` ([Install Tyk Operator](/docs/tyk-stack/tyk-operator/installing-tyk-operator)). After the trial, [contact Tyk](https://tyk.io/contact/) for a paid license. Prefer SaaS? [Tyk Cloud](https://tyk.io/sign-up/) has a free 48-hour trial with no credit card.

**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](/docs/portal/overview/intro)).

## Resilience, performance and rate limits

**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](/docs/tyk-configuration-reference/redis-cluster-sentinel)).** 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](/docs/api-management/mdcb), [Redis in Tyk](/docs/api-management/in-memory-database).

**Measured performance:** Tyk load-tests every release and publishes the results on its [performance benchmarks page](https://tyk.io/performance-benchmarks/) (AWS, GCP and Azure, 4 machine classes on each, multiple 5-minute runs, [open-source test methodology](https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk-ansible-performance-testing)). 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](/docs/api-management/rate-limit#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](/docs/api-management/access-control/sessions-and-keys/understanding-sessions). This is part of the open-source Tyk Gateway. Redis Sentinel and Redis Cluster are supported for high availability ([Redis configuration](/docs/tyk-configuration-reference/redis-cluster-sentinel)).

**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).

## Pricing

Tyk has no public list prices, by design: plans are quoted by Tyk sales ([contact Tyk](https://tyk.io/contact/)). 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. See [pricing](https://tyk.io/pricing/).

**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](https://www.gartner.com/reviews/product/tyk), 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.

## Details

- [Deployment options and licensing](/docs/apim)
- [Tyk Hybrid](/docs/deployment-options/tyk-hybrid)
- HTML page: https://tyk.io/self-managed/