head to head · open source
Tyk vs optillm
Tyk has 10,873 GitHub stars, 1,169 forks, 509 open issues and last shipped yesterday. optillm has 4,335 stars, 398 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Tyk leads on adoption by 151% (10,873 vs 4,335 stars). Tyk is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence; optillm is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Tyk has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, optillm 9%. Tyk was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (api-gateway, llm), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Tyk | optillm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 4.3K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 398 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Tyk if
- You weight community size — 11K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick optillm if
- You want the optillm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and optillm fits your workflow better
About Tyk
Documentation Forum Blog About Tyk API Gateway Tyk Gateway is the cloud native, open source, enterprise ready API Gateway supporting REST, GraphQL, TCP and gRPC protocols. Built from the ground up, as the fastest API Gateway on the planet since 2014. Tyk Gateway is provided ‘Batteries included’, with no feature lockout. Enabling your organization to rate limit, auth, gather analytics, apply microservice patterns and more with ease. Tyk runs natively on Kubernetes , if you prefer, thanks to the Tyk Kubernetes Operator Everything you need to manage APIs. Follow the simple Get Started guide below 👇 The Enterprise…
About optillm
OptiLLM 🚀 2 10x accuracy improvements on reasoning tasks with zero training 🤗 HuggingFace Space • 📓 Colab Demo • 💬 Discussions OptiLLM is an OpenAI API compatible optimizing inference proxy that implements 20+ state of the art techniques to dramatically improve LLM accuracy and performance on reasoning tasks without requiring any model training or fine tuning. It is possible to beat the frontier models using these techniques across diverse tasks by doing additional compute at inference time. A good example of how to combine such techniques together is the CePO approach from Cerebras. ✨ Key Features 🎯…
read the full optillm overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Tyk or optillm more popular?
Tyk has 10,873 GitHub stars and optillm has 4,335. Tyk has the larger community by that measure.
Are Tyk and optillm free?
Both are open source. Tyk has no licence declared in this registry, and optillm is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Tyk and optillm?
Tyk is written in Go and optillm in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Tyk or optillm?
Choose Tyk if you want the larger community (10,873 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose optillm if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.