Alibaba Cloud VPN Gateway vs Pomerium

Alibaba Cloud VPN Gateway carries encrypted traffic between Alibaba Cloud VPCs and enterprise data centers, office networks, or Internet platforms over the Internet. It supports site-to-site networking and hybrid access through IPsec, IKE, and SSL VPN connections. Customers manage it through a visual console, API, or SDK, with integrations including ECS, VPC, NAT Gateway, RDS, and SLB. IPsec-VPN and SSL-VPN encrypt data in transit; SSL-VPN offers AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, and AES-256-CBC, with AES-128-CBC as default. Alibaba Cloud describes hot-standby failover in less than a few seconds, session continuity, and zero service downtime. Standard bandwidth reaches 1,000 Mbps total inbound and outbound, or 500 Mbps in some regions. Listed platforms include Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS through IPsec. Pricing is paid, with a $0.06 a month Chinese-mainland 10 Mbps connection and a $0.05 a month five-client SSL specification.

Pomerium is an open-source identity-aware proxy for controlling access to internal applications, servers, services, and workloads without requiring VPN client software. It checks identity, device state, and request context before granting access, and authenticates through identity providers that support OpenID Connect. Listed access scenarios include HTTP, MCP, SSH, gRPC, TCP, and UDP; supported app protocols also include HTTPS, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and WebSocket. Pomerium removes its authentication cookies before forwarding requests upstream, and sensitive databroker data is encrypted at rest. Downstream TLS has a minimum of TLS 1.2. Deployment options include Linux and macOS binaries, packages, Docker images, source builds, and desktop clients for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The free Personal plan lists 10 users, 10 routes, five policies, and two service accounts. Business costs $7.00 per month, billed annually, and lists limits of 1,000 users, 100 routes, 100 policies, and 20 service accounts. A free trial is also listed.