Our great sponsors
-
sshuttle
Transparent proxy server that works as a poor man's VPN. Forwards over ssh. Doesn't require admin. Works with Linux and MacOS. Supports DNS tunneling.
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
For single applications that are able to "cooperate" with being proxied, a proxy server can make much more sense than a VPN, yes.
The less cooperative your applications are (even though cooperation can be somewhat enforced using tsocks, as you mention, which can be further made to apply system-wide using sshuttle [1]), the more a VPN will start to make sense.
NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.