| (Caveat: I’m the CEO of Tyk) Tyk offers a more “batteries included” approach to Kong, and so doesn’t rely on external plugin authors to extend the ecosystem. 100% of our dev team are constantly working on our open source components and we like to keep it that way. Because of that, Tyk isn’t “open core” like Kong is, there’s no lock-in or levers to get you to buy our value-adds like our Management Dashboard GUI or our Multi-Data-Center clustering add-on - you should be able to do all API Management without having to pay us a penny. A simple example is OpenID connect support, this is a Kong enterprise plugin, with Tyk that comes as part of the normal gateway. In terms of performance Tyk and Kong are pretty close now (Tyk pre 2.6 was slower) but we believe we now have parity, especially when switching on things like analytics, auth and rate limiting. Tyk works very well in k8s though we don’t have a helm chart yet (coming soon). You can also deploy Tyk as pure SaaS (fully managed), hybrid cloud (we handle back-end and control plane, you install gateways local to services) and full on-prem (install anywhere: K8s, AWS, GCP, Azure - even on Arm servers). We’re unique in that regard. Tyk has always been separated into control-plane and operations-level components (our gatewaybis very small), so we don’t see that as something new to crow about. If you use our Dashboard, it moves the configuration and data layer out of the gateways and moves it centrally. If you use our MDCB system (enterprise) you can extend that capability across clusters in different clouds to get really targeted, distributed API governance. There’s a bunch of other things that are different too, but they are more functional. |
I contacted Kong sales once about OpenID connect support, they basically dismissed us as too small. Needless to say we took Kong out of our stack and won't consider it again.