Zuplo
API Gateway Comparison

Zuplo vs
Unkey

A Full API Gateway Alternative to Unkey's Keys and Compute Platform

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Feature
Zuplo
Unkey
Request Proxying & Routing
Developer Portal for API Consumers
Programmability
GitOps & CI/CD
AI & MCP
AccuWeather
Read the Case Study
Blockdaemon
Read the Case Study
Lake Michigan Credit Union
Read the Case Study
Finsolutia
Read the Case Study
VNDR
Read the Case Study
Mews
Read the Case Study
Yext
Read the Case Study
Zumiez
Read the Case Study

What's wrong with Unkey

Unkey's key limitations for modern engineering teams

The forces driving enterprises off Unkey in 2026 — operational tax, plugin sprawl, retrofitted AI, and pricing that doesn't predict.

Sentinel is Tied to Unkey Deploy

Unkey's Sentinel reverse proxy enforces auth, rate limiting, firewall rules, and OpenAPI validation, and is today positioned as the proxy for Unkey Deploy applications. Teams that want a managed gateway in front of workloads on AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, or on-prem typically pair Unkey with a separate proxy, or move their compute onto Unkey Deploy. Sentinel policies are configured through the Unkey dashboard today.

No Shipped Consumer-Facing Developer Portal

Unkey currently ships a workspace dashboard for your team to manage keys, identities, and analytics. An "AIO Developer Portal" with hosted OpenAPI docs, self-serve key issuance, and usage views is listed on Unkey's homepage as "coming soon" and is not yet available to customers.

No Turn-Key API Monetization Flow

Unkey exposes per-key usage, credits, refills, and variable per-route costs that can be exported to a billing system you wire up. Unkey does not currently publish a first-class Stripe meter or subscription integration that invoices your API consumers out of the box.

Why Zuplo

Built for teams replatforming off Unkey

Managed, modern API management with predictable economics across procurement cycles — no operator overhead, no plugin sprawl, no consumption-pricing surprises.

Product Category

Gateway-first platform vs. keys + hosting + coupled proxy

Request Proxying & Routing

Proxy for any upstream vs. proxy coupled to Unkey Deploy

Developer Portal for API Consumers

Shipping consumer portal vs. announced and pending

A solutions architect can walk you through your current Unkey setup, surface the biggest operational tax, and map a migration path — no slide deck required.

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Enterprise ready

Production-ready for regulated and high-volume workloads

Compliance & Audit

  • SOC 2 Type II audited annually
  • Third-party penetration test reports available under NDA
  • GDPR-aligned data processing
  • Audit logs across the control plane
  • API governance with policy enforcement

Identity & Access

  • SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning
  • Role-based access control across organizations, projects, and environments
  • Service-account credentials with scoped permissions
  • API key metadata for downstream authorization

Deployment Flexibility

  • Managed edge across 300+ locations — global by default
  • Managed dedicated single-tenant on AWS, Azure, GCP, Akamai, or any major cloud
  • Self-hosted on Kubernetes with full control plane
  • Bring-your-own-cloud for data residency requirements

Support & Success

  • Up to 30-minute response SLA on Enterprise
  • 24/7/365 emergency hotline for critical incidents
  • Named technical account manager
  • Architecture and migration professional services

See it in action

See Zuplo running on your stack

A 30-minute working session with a Zuplo solutions engineer. Bring an OpenAPI spec or a Kong route definition and walk away with a working preview.

Talk to Sales Compare features

Side by side

Feature-by-feature comparison

Feature
Zuplo
Unkey
Product Category
Fully managed API gateway and management platform that sits in front of your API, regardless of where the API runs, and handles authentication, routing, rate limiting, transformations, developer portal, and monetization.
Unified developer platform combining API key management and rate limiting with Unkey Deploy (container hosting, public beta) and Sentinel (a reverse proxy that fronts Deploy apps).
Request Proxying & Routing
Terminates client traffic at the edge, routes to upstream backends anywhere (AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, on-prem, or Zuplo-hosted), supports URL rewrites, header/body transformations, and policy pipelines defined in TypeScript and JSON.
Sentinel is a reverse proxy, currently positioned for applications running on Unkey Deploy rather than arbitrary upstreams. To use Sentinel today, you deploy your workload on Unkey infrastructure. Policies are configured via the dashboard.
Developer Portal for API Consumers
Built-in developer portal on every plan, generated from OpenAPI, with self-serve API key issuance, interactive docs, and monetization. Unlimited portals included in Free and Builder tiers.
Today Unkey provides a workspace dashboard for your team, not a consumer-facing portal for your API's end users. Unkey's homepage lists an "AIO Developer Portal" (hosted docs, keys, usage) as coming soon.
API Key Management
Built-in API key service with programmatic creation, rotation, revocation, metadata, and self-service via the developer portal. Unlimited keys on every tier.
Core product. Issue, verify, and revoke keys with metadata, expirations, usage limits, roles, permissions, and identities. Includes one-way hashed keys, audit logs, SQL analytics on verification data, and a GitHub Secret Scanning integration that auto-revokes leaked keys.
Rate Limiting
Programmable rate limits scoped per key, user, plan, route, or any request attribute, enforced at the edge before traffic reaches your origin.
Rate limiting is a core Unkey feature, including identity-level limits shared across all keys tied to an identity and standalone rate-limit endpoints callable from any backend. Sentinel can also enforce limits for Unkey Deploy apps.
Authentication Options
API keys, JWT/OAuth2 validation, mTLS, and custom authentication written in TypeScript. Native integrations with Auth0, Clerk, Firebase, Supabase, Okta, and AWS Cognito.
API key authentication with roles, permissions, and identities layered on top. Other auth methods (JWT, OAuth, mTLS) are typically handled by the consuming application, not by Unkey or Sentinel.
Programmability
Custom policies written in TypeScript that run inside the gateway pipeline, with access to the full request/response and the npm ecosystem.
Unkey core behavior is configured via dashboard, REST API, and SDKs. Sentinel policies are currently configured through the dashboard; custom per-request logic runs in your own application code.
GitOps & CI/CD
Git-native workflow with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and Azure DevOps; gateway configuration lives alongside your code in Git.
Unkey Deploy supports Git-based deploys of your application code. Gateway-style configuration for Sentinel and key management is primarily managed through the dashboard, REST API, and CLI rather than committed alongside the code.
Monetization
Native Stripe integration for usage-based billing, with per-call metering against configured rate cards and automatic reporting to Stripe Billing.
Unkey tracks per-key usage, credits, refills, and variable per-route costs that can be exported to a billing system. Unkey does not currently publish a first-class Stripe meter or subscription integration for invoicing your API consumers out of the box.
Usage Primitives for Billing
Metering, rate cards, and spend limits configured in the gateway and reported to Stripe via the native integration.
First-class usage primitives (per-key credits, refills, and variable per-route costs) that downstream billing systems can consume.
AI & MCP
AI Gateway with MCP Gateway, semantic caching, multi-provider failover, token-based rate limits, and spend limits, all built into the core platform.
Unkey publishes an MCP server so AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude Code can manage Unkey itself (keys, rate-limit config, analytics queries). Unkey does not currently publish a dedicated MCP gateway product for routing or governing third-party MCP or LLM traffic.
Hosting & Deployment Model
Managed Edge (default, 300+ data centers), Managed Dedicated (AWS, Azure, GCP, Akamai, Equinix), and Self-Hosted Kubernetes.
SaaS hosted by Unkey on AWS Fargate with Global Accelerator (per Unkey's August 2025 "Why we're leaving serverless" post). Workloads deployed via Unkey Deploy run on the same infrastructure. The core platform is source-available under AGPLv3 and can be self-hosted from the repository.
Licensing
Commercial platform; self-hosted deployment available on Enterprise plans.
Source-available under AGPLv3, with subdirectories such as `/packages` and `/internal/icons` carrying separate licenses per the repository's LICENSE file.
Pricing Entry Point
Free tier includes 100K requests/month with unlimited API keys, environments, and developer portals. Builder is $25/month.
As of April 2026, Unkey's pricing is compute-based around Deploy and Sentinel, with Free, Starter ($5/mo), Pro ($25/mo, up to 10 Sentinels per project), Business ($50/mo, up to 100 Sentinels per project), and Enterprise tiers. Each paid tier bundles matching usage credits and is metered on vCPU/sec, GB/sec, and egress. Check unkey.com/pricing for current limits.

What our customers say

Trusted by engineering teams at scale

Blockdaemon

90%

Hardware footprint reduction at scale

"The move to Zuplo from our existing API Management vendor was easy, taking just over 2 months to switch mission critical systems, and we're saving over 70% on costs."

Ryan Waites

Senior Director, Blockdaemon

Case study →

"Zuplo gives us the flexibility to scale efficiently, ensures security and compliance, and reduces operational complexity so we can focus on building new capabilities."

Daryl Benzel

Staff Software Engineer, Yext

Case study →
AccuWeather

1B+

End users served via Zuplo APIs

Finsolutia

Hours

To launch MCP server on regulated APIs

"We didn't touch a line of code, it's just plug and play. The results were very surprising, in just a couple of hours we had a great result and a fully working MCP Server."

Miguel Madeira

CTO & Co-Founder, Finsolutia

Case study →

Trusted for regulated and high-volume workloads

SOC 2 Type II Third-party penetration testing GDPR-aligned 24/7/365 emergency hotline
300+ Global edge locations
Billions API requests served / month
Up to 99.999% Enterprise uptime SLA
<20s Global deploy time

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Zuplo vs Unkey.

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