Compare the Top Free API Gateways as of July 2025

What are Free API Gateways?

An API gateway is the server or node located between client and backend services or microservices endpoints. API gateways are used for API management, with the API gateway managing and processing API requests that come in via microservices. Another way to think of an API gateway is that it is the software layer that lives in front of an API interface, which handles API requests. Compare and read user reviews of the best Free API Gateways currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    KrakenD

    KrakenD

    KrakenD

    KrakenD is a high-performance API Gateway optimized for resource efficiency, capable of managing 70,000 requests per second on a single instance. The stateless architecture allows for straightforward, linear scalability, eliminating the need for complex coordination or database maintenance. It supports various protocols and API specifications, with features like fine-grained access controls, data transformation, and caching. Unique to KrakenD is its ability to aggregate multiple API responses into one, streamlining client-side operations. Security-wise, KrakenD aligns with OWASP standards and doesn't store data, making compliance simpler. It offers a declarative configuration and integrates with third-party logging and metrics tools. With transparent pricing and an open-source option, KrakenD is a comprehensive API Gateway solution for organizations prioritizing performance and scalability.
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  • 2
    Amazon API Gateway
    Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications. API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out and, with the API Gateway tiered pricing model, you can reduce your cost as your API usage scales.
    Starting Price: $0.90
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  • 3
    Tyk

    Tyk

    Tyk Technologies

    Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations. By making our capabilities easily accessible to developers, we make it fast, simple and low-risk for big enterprises to manage their APIs, adopt microservices and adopt GraphQL. Whether self-managed, cloud or a hybrid, our unique architecture and capabilities enable large, complex, global organisations to quickly deliver highly secure, highly regulated API-first applications and products that span multiple clouds and geographies.
    Starting Price: $600/month
  • 4
    Azure API Management
    Manage APIs across clouds and on-premises: In addition to Azure, deploy the API gateways side-by-side with the APIs hosted in other clouds and on-premises to optimize API traffic flow. Meet security and compliance requirements while enjoying a unified management experience and full observability across all internal and external APIs. Move faster with unified API management: Today's innovative enterprises are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. Streamline your work across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with a single place for managing all your APIs. Help protect your resources: Selectively expose data and services to employees, partners, and customers by applying authentication, authorization, and usage limits.
  • 5
    Ambassador

    Ambassador

    Ambassador Labs

    Ambassador Edge Stack is a Kubernetes-native API Gateway that delivers the scalability, security, and simplicity for some of the world's largest Kubernetes installations. Edge Stack makes securing microservices easy with a comprehensive set of security functionality, including automatic TLS, authentication, rate limiting, WAF integration, and fine-grained access control. The API Gateway contains a modern Kubernetes ingress controller that supports a broad range of protocols including gRPC and gRPC-Web, supports TLS termination, and provides traffic management controls for resource availability. Why use Ambassador Edge Stack API Gateway? - Accelerate Scalability: Manage high traffic volumes and distribute incoming requests across multiple backend services, ensuring reliable application performance. - Enhanced Security: Protect your APIs from unauthorized access and malicious attacks with robust security features. - Improve Productivity & Developer Experience
  • 6
    WSO2 API Manager
    One complete platform for building, integrating, and exposing your digital services as managed APIs in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures to drive your digital transformation strategy. Implement industry-standard authorization flows — such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, and JWTs — out of the box and integrate with your existing identity access or key management tools. Build APIs from existing services, manage APIs from internally built applications and from third-party providers, and monitor their usage and performance from inception to retirement. Provide real-time access to API usage and performance statistics to decision-makers to optimize your developer support, continuously improve your services, and drive further adoption to reach your business goals.
  • 7
    Kong Gateway
    The world’s most popular API gateway. Built for hybrid and multi-cloud, optimized for microservices and distributed architectures. Get started today – download Kong Gateway for free. Kong Gateway supports hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure, and includes a Kubernetes-native ingress solution and support for declarative configuration management. Kong Gateway is part of the Konnect managed connectivity platform. Konnect delivers connectivity functionality such as API Portals and AI-based anomaly detection, while providing the flexibility of running high performance connectivity runtimes. Use one of the many plugins developed by Kong or our community to add the functionality you need. Build your own plugin with our built in, well-documented plugin development kit. Configure Gateway natively using an API, web UI, or with declarative configuration to manage updates via your CI/CD pipelines.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 8
    APIPark

    APIPark

    APIPark

    APIPark is an open-source, all-in-one AI gateway and API developer portal, that helps developers and enterprises easily manage, integrate, and deploy AI services. No matter which AI model you use, APIPark provides a one-stop integration solution. It unifies the management of all authentication information and tracks the costs of API calls. Standardize the request data format for all AI models. When switching AI models or modifying prompts, it won’t affect your app or microservices, simplifying your AI usage and reducing maintenance costs. You can quickly combine AI models and prompts into new APIs. For example, using OpenAI GPT-4 and custom prompts, you can create sentiment analysis APIs, translation APIs, or data analysis APIs. API lifecycle management helps standardize the process of managing APIs, including traffic forwarding, load balancing, and managing different versions of publicly accessible APIs. This improves API quality and maintainability.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 9
    Oracle API Management
    Complete API Lifecycle Management solution that supports agile API development and makes it easy to keep an eye on KPIs. True hybrid API development on any cloud and on-premises that is modern and adaptable, employing the most up-to-date security protocols. Innovate quickly to increase efficiency and bump up your bottom line. Ensure the most up-to-date security policies are in place. Use the same integration tool for either cloud or on-premises deployment for full portability. Manage your cloud service using purpose-built cloud tooling for administrative operations like backup, restore, scale-out/in, or scale up/down. Full administrative access to the SOA server through a web-based administrative console, and access to virtual machines using SSH.
  • 10
    Kusk

    Kusk

    Kubeshop

    Kusk is an Open Source API Gateway that allows you to develop, monitor and deploy your APIs in a matter of minutes. Kusk powers-up your API workflows with mocked responses and validated requests out-of-the-box and automates the deployment of the API Gateway with your favorite GitOps workflows. Have a single source of truth for your API by using the OpenAPI Standard, meaning no additional configuration files are needed!
    Starting Price: Free
  • 11
    Fusio

    Fusio

    Apioo

    Fusio is an open source API management platform which helps to build and manage REST APIs. Through Fusio you can quickly build a state of the art API, set up a developer portal and monetize your API. Fusio provides a simple to use and intuitive backend. Through the backend it is possible to control and manage the complete API. Fusio provides a ready to use developer portal app which you can use to set up your API program. This is the place where developers can register to consume your API. Fusio contains many actions which you can use out of the box to solve various tasks. I.e. to proxy HTTP requests to an internal API or generate an API based on a database table. This means you can build APIs in a Low-Code style without the need to write complex code. Fusio contains a Worker-System which allows you to develop actions in different programming languages, Fusio currently supports Java, Javascript, PHP and Python.
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