Reachability tools, which are not deployment platforms
Anyport vs Pangolin
Pangolin is not a competitor and this page would be dishonest if it pretended otherwise. It is an identity-based remote access platform built on WireGuard, combining a reverse proxy with VPN capabilities, and it does not build or deploy applications.
If your deployment story is already solved and you only need to reach what you run, Pangolin or Cloudflare Tunnel is the smaller and better answer. Anyport overlaps with it on exactly one function, publishing an application from a network with no inbound route, and differs in that publishing is a side effect of the deployment rather than the product.
What both of them do
This much is common ground, so the table below is only about where they differ.
- Reaching services in a network with no inbound route.
- HTTPS on your own domain in front of them.
- No inbound firewall rule on your side.
Where they differ
The short answer first, and the detail underneath it where the short answer would otherwise mislead.
| Pangolin | Anyport | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Pangolin Remote access over WireGuard Identity-based, with a reverse proxy in front. | Anyport A deployment control plane It builds, deploys and then publishes. |
| Does it deploy your application | Pangolin No | Anyport Yes Push to a branch and it builds on your own cluster and rolls out as a numbered revision. |
| Runtime | Pangolin Anything reachable from the connector | Anyport Kubernetes Anyport can install k3s on a bare machine if you do not have a cluster. |
| How traffic reaches your network | Pangolin A WireGuard tunnel to a node you run You put that node somewhere with a public address. | Anyport The connection the agent already opened TLS is not terminated on the way through. |
| Who runs the public endpoint | Pangolin You do, on a VPS | Anyport We do And only for clusters with no public address of their own. |
| Access control | Pangolin Over your applications' visitors Identity-aware access, which Anyport does not do. | Anyport Over your team Roles on the platform, not on who can reach your application. |
| Price | Pangolin Open source, plus paid tiers Community edition, with managed and Enterprise options. | Anyport Free today With a 10 GiB monthly allowance on gateway traffic for private clusters. |
| Compliance | Pangolin See their site | Anyport Not certified yet Controls are published in full on the security page instead. |
What Pangolin is
Taken from their own documentation, read on 4 September 2026.
Pangolin describes itself as an open-source, identity-based remote access platform built on WireGuard, combining reverse proxy and VPN capabilities for web applications and private resources.
It does not build or deploy applications. It provides access to things that are already running.
It can be self-hosted or used as a managed cloud service, with Community and Enterprise editions.
It was the fastest-growing project in this whole comparison when we last measured stars, on 22 August 2026.
Choose Pangolin if
- You already have a way to deploy and only need to reach or publish what is running.
- You want identity-aware access in front of internal tools, which Anyport does not provide.
- You want to run the public endpoint yourself on a VPS you control, with no vendor in the path.
Choose Anyport if
- The deploying is the part you actually want solved, and the publishing is a consequence of it.
- You would otherwise be assembling a deployment tool and a tunnel and owning the seam between them.
- You want managed databases, previews, cron tasks, logs and metrics in the same place as the routing.
Questions
- Can I use Pangolin with Anyport?
- Nothing stops you. They are different layers. If a cluster already publishes through Pangolin or Cloudflare Tunnel, Anyport does not need to be in the traffic path at all: our gateway is used only for clusters with no public address, and a cluster that has one serves its own traffic directly.
- How does Anyport publish from a cluster with no public IP?
- The agent holds an outbound connection open, and requests for your hostname travel back down it. The gateway reads the server name from the TLS handshake, which the client sends before encryption is negotiated, and forwards the remaining bytes untouched. It terminates no TLS and holds no certificate for your domain.
- What does Anyport require of a cluster?
- A Kubernetes cluster you can run one command against, or a bare Linux machine where Anyport installs k3s first. No inbound port, no public IP, no load balancer that can obtain one, and no kubeconfig handed to us. The agent opens a connection outward and holds it open.
- What does Anyport cost?
- Every feature is free today, for everyone on your team, on up to 10 private clusters and 20 public ones. Compute is never metered because it is not ours. The one counted resource is traffic our gateway carries for clusters with no public address of their own, with an allowance of 10 GiB a month.
- Is Anyport audited or certified?
- Not yet. In place of a report, the security page documents what the agent runs with inside your cluster, what crosses the boundary and how secrets are stored, so a reviewer can evaluate the controls directly. Two of them hold regardless of certification: we never receive credentials for your Kubernetes API, and your workloads keep serving whether or not our control plane is reachable.
Sources
Read on 4 September 2026. If one of these pages now says something different, the source is right and this page is stale.
If Anyport is the one you want
Connecting a cluster is one command and takes a few minutes. Everything is free today, and the pricing page lists the limits that are actually enforced rather than the ones a plan would imply.