ngrok
Ranked 2 of 7 tunneling services by recommenders
People recommend it for quickly exposing a local port with little setup; the most common caveat is a restrictive free tier.
People recommend it for quickly exposing a local port with little setup; the most common caveat is a restrictive free tier.
33 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 19
- criticize it
- 14
- approval share
- 58%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 19 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Quick, simple way to expose ports
“If I wanted to share something internal with a friend I would use ngrok or any of the million alternatives.”
Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “Iroh 1.0” “exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds” “you could probably use ngrok and setup a remote on your laptop in a pinch”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “It's not you; GitHub is down again” - Comment from 1 Apr 2026 on Hacker News
Works well in practice
“Something Ngrok is doing is working”
Comment from 11 Aug 2026 in “Compression Is Prediction” “ngrok is working well for me”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “A ngrok-style secure tunnel server written in Rust and Open Source” Built-in tunnel protections and warning page
“An interstitial warning page is probably the happy medium, and what ngrok already uses now.”
Comment from 5 Aug 2026 in “Phishers are hijacking legitimate cloud infrastructure” “allows you to actually put protections in place for your tunnel”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What are all the ways to punch through NAT?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Free tier restrictive or unreliable
“hasn't found a way to finance itself without removing the pure free tunneling option”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels” “the free tier of ngrok (broken SSH tunnel)”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and Nginx” “ngrok's free tier got too restrictive”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: tnnl - Self-hosted ngrok alternative with request inspection and replay” Slow latency and assets loading
“you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too slow to load the local host assets”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels” “they all were pretty slow, fair enough for the free tier”
Comment from 19 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Pipenet – A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel” “frustrated with ngrok's latency and session limits”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Tunn – open-source ngrok alternative built on QUIC, 4x faster” Custom domains cost money
“great tool, but custom domains cost money”
Comment from 6 Nov 2025 in “Show HN: Relay – Self-hosted tunnel with memorable subdomains” “Way better than Ngrok and you can set it up on a custom subdomain you own.”
Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”
Other tunneling services people recommend
The four most recommended other tunneling services, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Quick Tunnels | 29 | 26 | 53% | 1 | — | — |
| ngrokThis page | 19 | 14 | 58% | 11 | — | — |
| Tunnl.gg | 12 | 4 | 75% | 2 | — | — |
| BitBang | 10 | 1 | 91% | 3 | — | — |
| Pinggy | 6 | 0 | 100% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
30 of the 33 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the free tier of ngrok (broken SSH tunnel)”
“sish or ngrok might be a better solution for the general case”
“you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too slow to load the local host assets”
“Way better than Ngrok and you can set it up on a custom subdomain you own.”
“exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota”
“ngrok had a similar slogan”
“hasn't found a way to finance itself without removing the pure free tunneling option”
“Something Ngrok is doing is working”
“An equivalent bare metal server would be much more expensive.”
“An interstitial warning page is probably the happy medium, and what ngrok already uses now.”
“If I wanted to share something internal with a friend I would use ngrok or any of the million alternatives.”
“allows you to actually put protections in place for your tunnel”
“I like the approach ngrok took - made a v1 that remained open source, but once realized it had high demand, built v2 closed as a paid service.”
“having to use ngrok every time just to expose a local filesystem for file editing is more cumbersome than expected”
“I just prayed no bots finds it and start extracting”
“After that I just told ngrok the port I was serving it on and voila.”
“ngrok is working well for me”
“They said they were too unreliable”
“exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance”
“frustrated with ngrok's latency and session limits”
“ngrok's free tier got too restrictive”
“I still use a ton of SaaS services for things that I could probably do just fine myself.”
“you could probably use ngrok and setup a remote on your laptop in a pinch”
“thats why i use caddy or ngrok.ai”
“they all were pretty slow, fair enough for the free tier”
“the easiest "self hosting" ever was when ngrok happened”
“I wanted to build something that was faster and more flexible for debugging than just a plain ngrok tunnel”
“which I like but hate due to having to sign in”
“pinggy remains a better alternative of ngrok”
“great tool, but custom domains cost money”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.