expose vs rathole
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted remote access & vpn options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | expose | rathole |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 89 · Excellent | 75 · Good |
| Category | Remote Access & VPN | Remote Access & VPN |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | PHP | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 256 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | bare-metal, docker | binary, docker |
| GitHub stars | ★ 4,574 | ★ 14,252 |
| First released | 2020 | 2021 |
| Replaces | ngrok | ngrok, frp |
What are expose and rathole?
expose
expose is an open-source, PHP-based tunneling tool that shares local websites with anyone via a secure public URL. The server can be fully self-hosted on your own domain.
- Self-hosted tunnel server
- Custom domains and subdomains
- Request inspection
- Built with Laravel
rathole
rathole is a secure, stable, and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal written in Rust. It is a lightweight alternative to frp with a small binary and low memory use.
- NAT traversal tunneling
- Tiny memory footprint
- Noise protocol encryption
- High connection capacity
expose vs rathole: key differences
Expose is written in PHP, while rathole is built with Rust. Licensing differs — MIT for expose versus Apache-2.0 for rathole. Rathole is the lighter option, starting around 64 MB of RAM against 256 MB for expose. Rathole has the considerably larger community, at 14,252 GitHub stars versus 4,574.
Why pick each one
Choose expose if…
- Released under the MIT license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Active community (4.6k GitHub stars)
- Written in PHP
Choose rathole if…
- Tiny binary and memory use
- Simple TOML config
- Encrypted transport
Watch out for
- Fewer features than frp
- No web dashboard
Frequently asked questions
Is expose or rathole better?
Neither is universally better. rathole has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are expose and rathole free and open-source?
Yes. expose is licensed under MIT and rathole under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run expose and rathole with Docker?
expose: yes. rathole: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, expose or rathole?
rathole has the smaller minimum footprint at 64 MB of RAM, compared to about 256 MB for expose. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.