awesome-tunneling VS selfhosted-gateway

Compare awesome-tunneling vs selfhosted-gateway and see what are their differences.

awesome-tunneling

List of ngrok/Cloudflare Tunnel alternatives and other tunneling software and services. Focus on self-hosting. (by anderspitman)

selfhosted-gateway

Self-hosted Docker native tunneling to localhost. Expose local docker containers to the public Internet with a docker compose interface. (by fractalnetworksco)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
awesome-tunneling selfhosted-gateway
107 55
12,623 1,090
- 7.0%
6.4 7.6
10 days ago 16 days ago
Shell
- GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

awesome-tunneling

Posts with mentions or reviews of awesome-tunneling. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-21.
  • Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Mar 2024
    I haven't tried vscode forwarding. What features does it have that are missing from most of the options on the list[0]?

    If you want a nice GUI for remote managing maybe check out one of my tools, boringproxy

    [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Mar 2024
    I maintain a list of similar tools here:

    https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

    I'm not sure there's a single class of software that's been implemented more times than ngrok-style tunneling. I keep finding more and more.

    Honestly it's a really fun exercise. Fairly challenging, but well within the reach of a single developer. I'm currently working on my 4th incarnation.

  • JIT WireGuard
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2024
    I maintain this list:

    https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

    Your use case sounds interesting and there may be a tool out there that will do it, but I can't quite wrap my head around your description of how everything is connected and what runs where with your current setup.

    I agree with sibling that my main question is what prevents you from using SSHFS or similar?

  • Would we still create Nebula today?
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Oct 2023
    We have a section for overlay networks on the tunneling list[0] I maintain. This is a very interesting space with some excellent software.

    I certainly have my gripes about the closed nature of Slack itself, in particular using a closed protocol when the model is clearly "federated" between multiple servers internally. That said, the contribution of something on the scale and quality of Nebula back to the open source community is hard to argue with.

    [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling#overlay-ne...

  • Every Phone Should Be Able to Run Personal Website – Rohanrd.xyz
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    I'm a big proponent of this idea. Unfortunately IPv6 alone isn't enough, due to firewalls. It's just not realistic for the average person to be expected to set up port forwarding etc. Now, if something like UPnP was universally deployed alongside IPv6, that would pretty much do it.

    Personally, I think the future of self hosting is going to happen through IPv4 tunnels[0] with SNI routing. You also get the added benefit of not exposing your actual IP address, and dealing with things like DDoS become the tunnel provider's concern.

    [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    Lots of alternatives to Ngrok and Cloudflare - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling. What we need is more open source and permissives ones which are well maintained and easy to use. fwiw, I work on one in the list called zrok.io, its open source and we have a free SaaS version.

    I dont think (as the author suggests) that IPv6 everywhere is happening anytime soon.

  • Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Aug 2023
  • Tor is not just for anonymity
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jul 2023
    The internet is no longer as peer-to-peer friendly as it once was. Hence the existence of commercially-motivated hacks run by third parties such as hosting, e.g., Cloudflare, etc., including tunneling, e.g., ngrok, etc. Alternatively, Tor relies on third parties but AFAIK it's not so centralised and it's not commercially-motivated.

    That is what differentiates it from all the other options. There is no company behind it trying to make money by exploiting internet subscribers trying to connect with each other (not the so-called "tech" company).

    Tor can have uses other than the ones normally discussed such as anonymity and evading censorship. Tor can provide reachability without use of commercial eavesdropping third party intermediaries.

    For example, one can use Onion Services for advertising open IP:port information that is needed for peer-to-peer connections over other, faster peer-to-peer overlay networks, not the Tor network. The Onion Service can function as the "rendezvous" server for making peer-to-peer connection outside of Tor. Tor's Onion Services can be used to exchange IP:port information for making direct connections over the internet without using Tor. No need to use commercial third parties. Ngrok, Tailscale, etc. all require use of servers run by a commercial third party. Tor does not. There is ample free software that can establish peer-to-peer connections over the internet but in every case it requires some reachable server running this software on the internet, and for most users that means they have to run a server and pay a commercial third party for hosting. Tor has no such requirement.

    Imagine being able to share content with family, friends, colleagues without the need for so-called "tech" companies^1 acting as intermediaries ("middlemen"). With a reachable IPv4 address this becomes possible. It would be nice if every home internet access subscriber received a reachable IPv4 address from their ISP. No doubt, some do. But on today's internet most do not. The so-called "tech" companies all have reachable IPv4 addresses. Hence they assume the roles of middlemen and use this position to exploit internet subscribers for profit.

    Something like Tor provides a solution. Again, it is not always necessary to route all traffic over Tor. Tor can have other uses. When the goal is simply peer-to-peer connections, Onion Services can be used to bootstrap peer-to-peer overlay connections using the user's choice of software by providing a secure, reliable way to exchange IP:port information. Goal here when using Tor is not anonymity nor censorship evasion, it's reachability. Similarly, goal of peer-to-peer is not necessarily anonymity nor evading censorship either, it's bypassing commercially-motivated, eavesdropping middlemen known as "tech" companies, and avoiding the annoyances of advertising. A possible additional benefot of using Tor in this way is elevated privacy. Google, for example, cannot easily discover Onion Services. No one can discover Onion Services using ICANN DNS.

    1. The term "tech" as in "tech company" means a company, usually a website, that collects data from and about people to support the sale of advertising services because advertising services are the only services the company can sell on a scale large enough to sustain a profitable business.

    More reading/viewing:

    https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

    Tor Hidden Services (now called "Onion Services")

    https://jamielittle.org/2016/08/28/hidden.html

    As one author wrote on Github:

    "onion-expose is a utility that allows one to easily create and control temporary Tor onion services.

    onion-expose can be used for any sort of TCP traffic, from simple HTTP to Internet radio to Minecraft to SSH servers. It can also be used to expose individual files and allow you to request them from another computer.

    Why not just use ngrok?

    ngrok is nice. But it requires everything to go through a central authority (a potential security issue), and imposes artificial restrictions, such as a limit of one TCP tunnel per user. It also doesn't allow you to expose files easily (you have to set it up yourself)."

    https://github.com/ethan2-0/onion-expose

    As another Github contributor put it:

    "With onionpipe, that service doesn't need a public IPv4 or IPv6 ingress. You can publish services with a globally-unique persistent onion address, and share access securely and privately to your own allowlist of authorized keys.

    You don't need to rely on, and share your personal data with for-profit services (like Tailscale, ZeroTier, etc.) to get to it."

    https://github.com/cmars/onionpipe

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36734956

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445421

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29929399

    "Finally, onion services are private by default, meaning that users must discover these sites organically, rather than with a search engine." [Small websites with small audiences get buried by advertising-supported search engines anyway.]

    https://nymity.ch/onion-services/pdf/sec18-onion-services.pd...

    https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6112_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412301...

    https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Bypassing_NAT (Termux recommends Tor over Ngrok)

    https://github.com/ajvb/awesome-tor

  • Serve a service/port on IPFS instead of content, ngrok decentralized alternative?
    2 projects | /r/ipfs | 9 Jul 2023
    It's actually one of the proposed alternatives in this repo: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling which was one of my main sources of research for a service that I could use, it seems to suggest a lot of open-source self-hostable solutions too.
  • Best 5 ngrok alternatives in 2023
    3 projects | /r/webdev | 6 Jun 2023
    In fact - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

selfhosted-gateway

Posts with mentions or reviews of selfhosted-gateway. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-01.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing awesome-tunneling and selfhosted-gateway you can also consider the following projects:

cloudflared - Cloudflare Tunnel client (formerly Argo Tunnel)

frp - A fast reverse proxy to help you expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.

Jellyfin - The Free Software Media System

yunohost - YunoHost is an operating system aiming to simplify as much as possible the administration of a server. This repository corresponds to the core code, written mostly in Python and Bash.

SirTunnel - Minimal, self-hosted, 0-config alternative to ngrok. Caddy+OpenSSH+50 lines of Python.

remotemoe - tunnels to localhost and other ssh plumbing

sish - HTTP(S)/WS(S)/TCP Tunnels to localhost using only SSH.

Home Assistant - :house_with_garden: Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.

localtunnel - expose yourself

tailscale - The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA.

caddy-webdav

ZeroTier - A Smart Ethernet Switch for Earth