Tyk

Tyk is an API gateway rather than a code host — it sits in front of the APIs a team already runs, wherever those APIs are built, and handles authentication, rate limiting, request transformation and analytics before traffic reaches the backend.

Nothing else in this category does that job; GitLab and the forges manage code and pipelines, Tyk manages what happens once an API built with any of them goes live. It deploys self-managed, hybrid or fully in Tyk Cloud, so a team keeps the option to run it entirely on its own infrastructure.

The gateway itself is genuinely open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, free to run and inspect on GitHub, with the paid tiers — Core, Professional and Enterprise — adding a developer portal, governance features and support rather than gating the core proxy. None of the three publishes a number on the pricing page; all three are quoted on request, alongside a 48-hour free trial of Tyk Cloud that needs no credit card.

Tyk is a London company, so it carries the UK's adequacy decision rather than EU membership — a real distinction for public-sector buyers, immaterial for most private ones. The bigger honest caveat is scope: Tyk manages API traffic, not source code or CI/CD, so it complements this category's forges and build tools rather than substituting for any of them, and a team evaluating it should already have an API to put in front of it.

What Tyk does well

• Open-source gateway under MPL-2.0, free to self-host
• Self-managed, hybrid or cloud deployment, your choice
• Developer portal for publishing and monetising APIs
• Unlimited API gateways on every paid plan
• 48-hour free Tyk Cloud trial, no card required

Where Tyk falls short

• No public pricing figures; every paid tier is quote-only
• UK jurisdiction: adequacy decision, not EU membership
• Manages API traffic only, not source code or builds
• Enterprise Edition features sit behind a separate commercial licence

Standout feature. The only tool in this category that manages API traffic rather than code — open source under MPL-2.0, with a paid tier layered on top.