localtunnel vs NPS
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare localtunnel with
choose an app… RustDesk frp Headscale Sunshine Tailscale JumpServer Algo VPN NetBird WG-Easy Neko Teleport GoTTY Moonlight Nebula ZeroTier Chisel Cockpit Termix OpenVPN Mosh rathole noVNC FreeRDP SoftEther VPN EasyTier ttyd Netmaker Sliver bore Apollo RustDesk Server Docker OpenVPN Firezone sshx Warpgate TigerVNC GOST MeshCentral n2n wstunnel Outline Server Webmin Next Terminal innernet Wetty KasmVNC WebSSH Remotely Pritunl Wirehole Nexterm zrok expose websockify Tactical RMM OpenZiti Webtop WireGuard Apache Guacamole Eternal Terminal pgrok Bastillion Sshwifty Shell In A Box strongSwan Xpra Headplane Defguard WebSSH2 Snowflake SSH Client tinc Games on Whales ShellHub Selkies Aspia tunnelmole ztncui Subspace frp-panel WireGuard Portal wayvnc PyRDP docker-baseimage-gui trzsz boringproxy SSHPiper Upterm Kasm Workspaces Headscale-Admin Wesher x11vnc Neko Rooms CloudTTY OpenConnect Server Apache Guacamole Lite gTunnel X2Go Guacozy Engity's Bifröst Cardea RPort Neutrinet SparkView
Compare NPS with
choose an app… frp Caddy Traefik Pi-hole acme.sh mitmproxy Kong Gateway Istio AdGuard Home Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora authentik SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Chisel Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager rathole OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd bore FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio GOST Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish zrok Caddy Docker Proxy expose Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG pgrok Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server tunnelmole Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager boringproxy Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock gTunnel Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit RPort Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Feature localtunnel NPS Category Remote Access & VPN Reverse Proxy & Gateways License MIT GPL-3.0 Language JavaScript Go Setup difficulty Easy Medium Min. RAM 128 MB 64 MB Deployment docker, binary docker, binary GitHub stars ★ 22,440 ★ 34,157 First released 2015 2019 Replaces ngrok ngrok
Why pick each one
Choose localtunnel if… Released under the MIT license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 22.4k GitHub stars localtunnel details Choose NPS if… Released under the GPL-3.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 34.2k GitHub stars Written in Go NPS details
Frequently asked questions Is localtunnel or NPS better? Neither is universally better. NPS has the larger community, while localtunnel is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are localtunnel and NPS free and open-source? Yes. localtunnel is licensed under MIT and NPS under GPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run localtunnel and NPS with Docker? localtunnel: yes. NPS: yes.