ngrok vs Pomerium
ngrok
ngrok.com
Pomerium
pomerium.comSide by side
| Figure | ngrok | Pomerium |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $10/mo | $7/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 9 |
| Spec score · Reverse Proxy Software | 9.1 (#1) | 8.9 (#3) |
| Audience | ngrok describes its Free and Hobbyist plans for developers, solo developers, home labs, and game servers, and Pay-as-you-go for teams shipping production traffic. | Businesses from startups to Global Fortune 2000 companies rely on Pomerium for access control. |
| Documentation depth | The documentation includes quickstarts, conceptual guides, examples, Traffic Policy recipes and API reference pages. | Documentation includes fundamentals courses, deployment guides, configuration reference, API reference, integrations and troubleshooting material. |
| Encryption | ngrok encrypts databases, filesystems, and data warehousing at rest, and agent-to-edge connections use TLS 1.2 or higher. | Sensitive databroker data, including session, user, directory, and service-secret data, is encrypted at rest. |
| Founded | 2015 | Pomerium's company history records its founding in 2019 by Bobby, who wrote the original code. |
| Funding | ngrok says it raised a $50 million Series A from Lightspeed and Coatue in 2022. | Axios reported that Pomerium raised a $13.75 million Series A led by Benchmark with Bain Capital, Haystack, SNR and Oleg Rogynskyy participating. |
| Integrations | Official documentation lists SDKs for Python, Go, Node and Rust and integrations including Okta SSO, Microsoft Entra ID and Datadog. | Listed integrations include Grafana, Kubernetes, Okta, Cloud Run, Docker, Google Kubernetes Engine, FleetDM, BambooHR, Auth0, Azure Active Directory, GitHub, GitLab, Google Workspace, OneLogin, OpenID Connect, and Ping Identity. |
| Product | ngrok is an all-in-one cloud networking platform that secures, transforms, and routes traffic to services wherever they run. | Pomerium is an open-source identity-aware proxy built around BeyondCorp and zero-trust principles. |
| Protocols | ngrok supports HTTP, TLS, and TCP, including WebSockets, gRPC, SSH, Postgres, MQTT, and Minecraft traffic. | The product site lists HTTP, MCP, SSH, gRPC, TCP and UDP access patterns. |
| Public API | The API reference covers endpoints, domains, certificates, Traffic Policy, tunnels, observability, IAM, secrets and Kubernetes operators. | The Pomerium API manages configuration resources including keys, policies, routes, service accounts and settings. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.2 out of 5 from 15 reviews | 4.8 out of 5 from 12 reviews. |
| Support | Paid support options include Dedicated On-Call with an 8 business hour SLA, plus Slack or Teams and 24×7 paging add-ons. | The pricing page lists community forum, email support, dedicated Slack channel, phone support, and dedicated customer success manager options. |
| TLS | ngrok provisions HTTPS certificates automatically and supports end-to-end encryption where it does not terminate TLS. | Downstream TLS accepts TLS 1.2 as the minimum version. |
| What it does | ngrok is developer infrastructure that routes and secures traffic to applications, APIs and AI models. | Pomerium is an identity-aware reverse proxy that provides application and service access without a traditional VPN or client software. |
Plans
ngrok
- FreeFree
- Hobbyist$10 a month
- Pay-as-you-go$20 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Pomerium
- Personal FreeFree
- Business$7 a month
- Zero PersonalFree
- Zero PersonalFree
- Zero Business$7 a month
- Zero Business (annual)$7 a month
- Zero Business (monthly)$9 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
ngrok
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.
Pomerium
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.