# localtunnel

5 Hacker News commenters recommended localtunnel and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People 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.

## What people warn about

- Drops connections, needs bypass header (1 comments): "It works but drops connections and requires a bypass-tunnel-reminder header on every request." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47428349))
- Slow compared with alternatives (1 comments): "I was trying ngrok, localtunnel, and a couple more, they all were pretty slow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682899))
- Hard to deploy in restrictive environments (1 comments): "makes localtunnel tricky to deploy in restrictive environments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692259))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Cloudflare Quick Tunnels](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-quick-tunnels.md): 29 recommend
- [ngrok](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ngrok.md): 19 recommend
- [Tunnl.gg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tunnl-gg.md): 12 recommend
- [BitBang](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bitbang.md): 10 recommend
- [Pinggy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pinggy.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "localtunnel", https://hackerapproved.com/p/localtunnel/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).