ngrok vs Openport

ngrok is a cloud networking platform that secures, transforms, and routes traffic to services wherever they run. Its agent sends traffic through secure tunnels without requiring firewall changes. Traffic Policy uses CEL-based rules to route requests, authenticate them, apply rate limits or web application firewall controls, and reject them. Supported traffic includes HTTP, TLS, and TCP, including WebSockets, gRPC, SSH, Postgres, MQTT, and Minecraft. The Integrations Hub offers integrations and guides for areas such as SSO, databases, Kubernetes, OAuth, webhooks, and web servers. ngrok also verifies webhook signatures for more than 70 providers, including Stripe, GitHub, Twilio, Slack, and Shopify. The free plan includes $5 one-time usage, up to 3 online endpoints, up to 1GB data transfer, up to 20k HTTP/S requests, and one team member. Paid access starts at $10/mo. On Hobbyist, endpoints stop working when usage credit runs out, until the billing cycle ends and credit resets. ngrok lists region pinning across the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia, India, Japan, and South America.

Openport lets users make a local TCP port reachable from the internet without opening a firewall port. It builds a tunnel between a device and the outside world for remote access, and its web service and API can show online IoT devices and manage a fleet. Access can be controlled by user groups. The `--http-forward` option assigns a hostname to a session for serving a local port over HTTP and HTTPS with a valid certificate. Custom-domain forwarding requires a CNAME record and works over HTTPS only. With TLS passthrough, TLS ends on the user's machine, keeping tunnelled traffic encrypted end to end. Forwarded ports require visitors to click a token link by default; a clicked link remains valid for 24 hours. Openport also lists brute-force blocking and port-scanning detection. It supports API, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows. Since client 2.3.0, sessions can forward UDP as well as TCP on the same port when the server supports it. The service was founded in 2014 and offers a free plan, a 30-day trial, and paid plans from $1/mo.