Best Open Source Secure Tunnels in 2026
Tools for creating secure, encrypted tunnels to expose local services or connect networks over the internet.
The most popular pick this year is Pangolin with 20,702 GitHub stars, but all 2 options below are worth considering depending on your needs.
2 open source secure tunnels — ranked by GitHub stars. Browse all
Pangolin
Pangolin is an open-source, self-hosted identity-aware tunneled reverse proxy server featuring a sleek dashboard UI, designed to securely expose private resources across distributed networks without the need for opening inbound ports or dealing with complex firewall rules. It builds encrypted tunnels—often leveraging a user-space WireGuard client called Newt—to connect isolated services, supports HTTP/HTTPS as well as raw TCP/UDP traffic, automates SSL via Let’s Encrypt, enables load balancing, and integrates identity and access management with SSO, role-based access control, 2FA, temporary share links, OAuth2/OIDC integration, and more.
Cloudflare
Proxly
A self-hosted tunneling tool — like ngrok, but on your own domain. Expose local dev servers through subdomains on your VPS.
ngrokHow we rank these tools
Tools are ranked by GitHub stars as a proxy for community adoption and trust. Stars reflect how many developers found a project valuable enough to bookmark — a reasonable signal for quality in the open source world. We only list tools that are actively maintained and open source.
Looking for tools you can run yourself? Browse self-hosted secure tunnels →