Best Free API Management Software

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.

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

Directus is an Open Data Platform for managing the content of any SQL database. It provides a powerful API layer for developers and an intuitive App for non-technical users. Written entirely in JavaScript (primarily Node.js and Vue.js), Directus is completely open-source, modular, and extensible, allowing it to be fully tailored to your exact project needs. With Directus Cloud, we've taken our open-source spirit to the cloud by offering Directus Community Cloud, a completely free tier - without quotas or limitations. It's ideal for hobby projects and demos, and when you're ready for production, Standard Cloud has the power and infrastructure options you need. Our pricing is usage-based, which means you only pay for what you use. Use Directus on your next headless cms, internal tool, or SaaS project, or use our Insights for better data management and analytics. With Directus, you're only limited by your imagination.

Backendless is a Visual App Development Platform (VADP) that combines API, user, and database management functionality with a user-friendly, web-based interface and UI Builder. Backendless offers the ability to send emails and push notifications and supports real-time chat and geolocation-based functionality. A Backendless application can be customized with manually written code or using our Codeless logic builder. The platform can be hosted on our cloud servers or installed and managed on your own private servers. The Backendless UI Builder allows you to build fully functional web and mobile apps. You can use the UI Builder, or Backendless works seamlessly with virtually any client-side environment, automatically morphing data to the proper format for the frontend operating system. A Backendless database can also be connected to external databases, allowing you to maintain existing data sources while also being able to manage those databases using Backendless' intuitive interface.

Telepresence streamlines your local development process, enabling immediate feedback. You can launch your local environment on your laptop, equipped with your preferred tools, while Telepresence seamlessly connects them to the microservices and test databases they rely on. It simplifies and expedites collaborative development, debugging, and testing within Kubernetes environments by establishing a seamless connection between your local machine and shared remote Kubernetes clusters. Why Telepresence: Faster feedback loops: Spend less time building, containerizing, and deploying code. Get immediate feedback on code changes by running your service in the cloud from your local machine. Shift testing left: Create a remote-to-local debugging experience. Catch bugs pre-production without the configuration headache of remote debugging. Deliver better, faster user experience: Get new features and applications into the hands of users faster and more frequently.

Gravitee.io is the easiest to use, most performant and cost-effective Open Source API Platform that helps your organization to secure, publish and analyze your APIs. Use the power of Gravitee.io to manage identities with our OAuth2, OpenID Connect (OIDC) and Financial-grade API (FAPI) certified server. Gravitee.io APIM is a flexible, lightweight and blazing-fast open source API Management solution that helps your organization control finely who, when and how users access your APIs. With strong governance features such as API review and API quality and our market leading API designer, Gravitee.io enables you to design, manage, deploy and monitor your APIs in a secure and governed way. A branded Gravitee.io portal enables your API consumers to fully engage with your business - delivering high quality engagement for your business in the digital age.

NGINX Open Source: The open source web server that powers more than 400 million websites. NGINX Plus is a software load balancer, web server, and content cache built on top of open source NGINX. Use NGINX Plus instead of your hardware load balancer and get the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure. Save more than 80% compared to hardware ADCs, without sacrificing performance or functionality. Deploy anywhere: public cloud, private cloud, bare metal, virtual machines, and containers. Save time by performing common tasks through the built‑in NGINX Plus API. From NetOps to DevOps, modern app teams need a self‑service, API‑driven platform that integrates easily into CI/CD workflows to accelerate app deployment – whether your app has a hybrid or microservices architecture – and makes app lifecycle management easier.

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!

Csmart is a secure, cloud-native API gateway tailored for telecom operators, MVNOs, MVNEs, and enterprises looking to become platform-driven TechCos. It enables seamless exposure, governance, and monetization of network services—such as messaging, location, voice/video, billing, and IoT—through TM‑Forum–aligned APIs. The platform delivers granular access control, real-time usage analytics, and flexible pricing models, transforming network assets into revenue streams. Low-code onboarding and multi-tenant architecture accelerate time-to-market and ensure scalable operations. AI-powered observability adds anomaly detection and self-healing capabilities for resilient performance. Whether enabling internal innovation or launching partner ecosystems, Csmart makes network capabilities consumable, controllable, and monetizable by design.

APILayer is an API marketplace that lists proprietary and third party APIs and makes them available to developers and business to all sizes. With APILayer you can get secure and scalable APIs easily. At APILayer they develop and list only the most reliable APIs for a given topic. The APIs can be tested by using a live demo on the marketplace itself. The APIs come with a guaranteed uptime of 99,9% and a subscription-based support. Enhance the power of your app with APILayer!