The best tunneling services, according to hackers
7 tunneling services recommended in Hacker News comments over the past year, ranked by how many separate people recommend each one.
- Most recommendedCloudflare Quick Tunnels29 people recommend it
- Least regretBitBang10 recommend, 1 criticize
All tunneling services
- Cloudflare Quick TunnelsFree, account-less way to share a local web service over HTTPS with one command; caveat: critics say it is not for long-lived production.29recommend
- ngrokPeople recommend it for quickly exposing a local port with little setup; the most common caveat is a restrictive free tier.19recommend
- Tunnl.ggRecommended as a free, client-free way to expose a local service with no signup. Critics say it is unsuitable for production and risky for traffic privacy.12recommend
- BitBangRecommended as a minimal open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale, with no account or port forwarding. Critics say it is unfinished and still needs a central server.10recommend
- PinggyPeople recommend it as a simple way to expose localhost with one command, using plain SSH and no software to install, and as an alternative to ngrok.6recommend
- sishPeople recommend sish for exposing local development servers over the network through SSH, with automatic TLS. Critics raise no recurring complaints in these quotes.6recommend
- localtunnelPeople recommend localtunnel as a quick, free way to expose a local server with a few commands; critics note it drops connections and needs a bypass header.5recommend