Licensing options not clear

Product Feature Requests & Feedback
1

I was evaluating API Gateways. I was comparing licensing of Kong and Tyk for commercial use. Kong’s license is clear - if you don’t need the official dashboard and enhanced official plugins, then its free for use (commercial or otherwise) with no limitation on number of nodes.

With Tyk, I am confused. My initial understanding was its free on one node for non commercial use. For multi node or commercial it is not free. Then I came across this on a blog:

We’ve received a valuable feedback from Tyk team. They let us know that is possible to scale the gateway if you use the CE without the dashboard (headless). Of course it’s absolutely free of charge just like Kong .

https://www.bbva.com/en/api-gateways-kong-vs-tyk/

So is the Tyk gateway - without the dashboard - free for commercial use? Further, is it also free if we deploy muli node cluster?

Based on the benchmarks mentioned in the same blog, it is also unclear why the dashboard affects performance. Is the dashboard tied to core functionality in some way? My naive understanding is that a dashboard, while not being used, should not affect server performance. Even when it is used, it should hardly cause any noticeable effect on the gateway’s throughput. But that I suppose it is a separate question.

2

Good day Priyank and thank you for your interest in Tyk!

The developer license is free to use for a period of 90 days for a single developer and no commercial / production use.
The Tyk Gateway (without the dashboard) is Open Source and free to use. You can deploy as many gateways as you wish without incurring any cost.
The dashboard, which is our admin / management GUI. is closed source and requires a license. The license fee is dependent on the number of gateways you wish to manage.
Our Open Source Gateway’s (a.k.a. Tyk Community Edition or Headless) documentation is fully visible under Tyk API Gateway Documentation - there is a getting started guide as well as the fully documented REST Apis you can use.
Does this answer your question?
/mike

3

For commercial use as well?

4

Hi Priyank - open source is open source. The gateway (without the dashboard) is free to use for whatever you wish to use it for.
Have fun!
/mike

5

Thanks Mike. I was just trying to be sure because sometimes things are open source but not free for commercial use.

Cheers!
Priyank