Tyk offers an open source and enterprise API gateway. See pricing tiers, key features, and how it compares to other API management platforms.
Tyk is an API gateway and API management platform that helps engineering teams build, secure, and monitor APIs across REST, GraphQL, TCP, and gRPC protocols. It sits between client applications and backend services, handling authentication, rate limiting, request routing, and analytics for every API call that passes through it.
The company was founded in London in 2014 by Martin Buhr, who originally built the Tyk Gateway as an open source side project for his own use before recognizing its potential for enterprise API infrastructure. Tyk Technologies is now headquartered in London with regional offices in Atlanta and Singapore, and is led by Buhr as CEO alongside co-founder and COO James Hirst.
Tyk is used by organizations across regulated and high-scale industries, including banks, retailers, and telecommunications providers, to standardize how internal and external APIs are secured, versioned, and exposed to developers. Its combination of a free open source gateway and a commercial management layer makes it attractive both to individual developers self-hosting a lightweight gateway and to large enterprises running multi-region, multi-cloud API programs.
At its core, the Tyk Gateway handles authentication (API keys, OAuth2, JWT, mTLS), rate limiting and quotas, request transformation, and traffic routing for REST, GraphQL, TCP, and gRPC APIs. It is cloud-native, lightweight, and can be deployed as a single binary or in containers and Kubernetes without heavy third-party dependencies beyond Redis.
On top of the free gateway, Tyk's commercial platform adds a Developer Portal for publishing APIs to internal or external developers with self-service key generation and documentation, a Dashboard GUI for centralized policy and analytics management, and a Management Control Plane for orchestrating gateways across multiple regions or clouds from one place.
Enterprise-focused capabilities include advanced governance and security controls, multi-region and multi-cloud deployment support, granular access policies, detailed analytics and observability, and integrations with identity providers and API design tools. Tyk supports Cloud (fully managed), Hybrid, and Self-Managed (on-premises) deployment models across every pricing tier.
The Tyk Gateway itself is fully open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and free to self-host indefinitely, with no licensing cost for the core gateway software. For teams that want the full management platform, Tyk sells three commercial tiers, all available across Cloud, Hybrid, and Self-Managed deployments: Core, aimed at startups and teams launching an API platform, uses predictable consumption-based pricing; Professional offers flat-rate pricing with unlimited APIs and unlimited monthly requests for teams standardizing on APIs at scale.
The Enterprise tier is custom-priced for regulated industries and mission-critical platforms, adding advanced governance, premium support with custom SLAs, multi-region and multi-cloud capabilities, and a named customer success manager. Tyk also offers a 48-hour free trial of Tyk Cloud with no credit card required, in addition to the always-free open source gateway.
Tyk is used as an API gateway and management platform to secure, route, rate-limit, and monitor REST, GraphQL, TCP, and gRPC API traffic.
The Tyk Gateway is free and open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, and can be self-hosted indefinitely at no cost; the full commercial management platform requires a paid plan.
Tyk was founded in London in 2014 by Martin Buhr, who is CEO, alongside co-founder and COO James Hirst.
Tyk supports Cloud (fully managed), Hybrid, and Self-Managed (on-premises) deployments across all its pricing tiers.
Tyk supports REST, GraphQL, TCP, and gRPC APIs through a single gateway.
Tyk offers a free open source gateway, plus Core (consumption-based), Professional (flat-rate), and Enterprise (custom) commercial tiers for the full management platform.
Tyk's customers include NatWest, SoundCloud, Zeiss, T-Mobile, Dollar General, AXA, Cisco, TripAdvisor, and USA Today.
Common alternatives include Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, and other open source or managed API gateway solutions.