# Pangolin

37 Hacker News commenters recommended Pangolin and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Self-hosted tunnel and reverse proxy that keeps home services off the public internet and replaces Cloudflare Tunnels. Critics say the enterprise edition is wrongly called open source.

## Why people recommend it

- Keeps services off the public internet (6 comments): "Pangolin handles this nicely. You can define alias addresses for internal resources and keep the fully private and off the public internet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302988)) "public services terminate on a disposable VPS and reverse-tunnel home only where needed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285387)) "Traditional reverse proxies require a public IP and open firewall ports." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029306))
- Replacement for Cloudflare Tunnels (4 comments): "Been using it for a month or so to replace my Cloudflare tunnels and it's been perfect." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308563)) "I replaced CF tunnels, which kept disconnecting every few minutes with it, and happy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028485)) "Pangolin is a great alternative to Cloudflare tunnels." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029488))
- Self-hostable and open source (3 comments): "Pangolin is a good solution to this because you can optionally self-host it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302998)) "Can be fully self-hosted. Also based on WireGuard." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303008)) "fully self-hostable open source" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029112))
- Easy setup and good performance (2 comments): "Reverse proxying to a VPS in Sydney with Pangolin achieved much better performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699381)) "Set up was easy and I never had any issues." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028422))

## What people warn about

- Enterprise edition marketed as open source (4 comments): "The main site also advertises "Self Host: Enterprise Edition" as being "100% Open Source" which is simply not true and false advertising." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028977)) "enterprise edition seems to be falsly advertised on the main site as open source" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029372)) "which is simply not true and false advertising" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028470))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [HAProxy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/haproxy.md): 24 recommend
- [Nginx Proxy Manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nginx-proxy-manager.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

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