Overview
Pangolin is a self-hosted tunneling reverse proxy that uses WireGuard under the hood to securely expose internal services without opening firewall ports. It includes an identity-aware access control layer, a web dashboard for managing tunnels and users, and serves as an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnel and Tailscale. Services can be made accessible via subdomains with granular per-service authentication policies. Deploys via Docker Compose.
Where it falls short of Heroku
- Requires a publicly accessible VPS to act as the tunnel endpoint, adding infrastructure overhead
- No managed global edge network; latency depends on your VPS location
- Ecosystem and third-party integrations are much smaller than Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale
- Mobile client support and device management are limited compared to Tailscale
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
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