30 open-source projects similar to netbirdio/netbird, ranked by shared indexed features. Tags may describe platforms or build tools rather than the same primary purpose. Check each project’s use case, license, and deployment requirements before treating it as a replacement.
Pangolin is a zero-trust remote access platform designed to provide secure, identity-aware connectivity to private network resources. It functions as a cloud-native network controller that orchestrates encrypted tunnels, traffic routing, and access policies across distributed environments. By leveraging WireGuard for secure data transport, the platform enables authenticated access to internal web applications, terminal sessions, and remote desktops without exposing services to the public internet. The platform distinguishes itself through a declarative infrastructure model that synchronizes n
Netmaker is a platform for automating and managing virtual mesh networks built on WireGuard. It functions as a centralized control plane that orchestrates encrypted, peer-to-peer tunnels across distributed infrastructure, including cloud environments, on-premise data centers, and containerized clusters. By automating the configuration of routing tables and access policies, the system enables secure, private connectivity between diverse devices and services without requiring manual network administration. The platform distinguishes itself through its focus on zero-trust network access and soft
Tailscale is a zero-trust networking overlay that connects distributed devices and services into a private, encrypted mesh network. By utilizing a high-performance, user-space implementation of the WireGuard protocol, it establishes secure peer-to-peer tunnels across diverse network topologies without requiring complex firewall configuration. The platform operates on a centralized control plane that manages global network state, authentication, and policy distribution, ensuring that connectivity is governed by identity rather than traditional IP-based rules. What distinguishes Tailscale is it
Nebula is a scalable, decentralized overlay networking tool designed to create secure, encrypted peer-to-peer connections between distributed hosts. By utilizing a certificate-based identity authority, it enables the construction of private communication fabrics across disparate physical infrastructures, such as multiple cloud providers or on-premises data centers, without requiring central authentication servers. The project distinguishes itself through a zero-trust architecture that enforces granular, policy-driven firewall filtering based on certificate-derived group memberships. It facili
Octelium is a zero-trust network access platform and identity-aware proxy designed to secure private HTTP, SSH, and SQL resources. It functions as a secure gateway that validates human and workload identities using OIDC, SAML, and FIDO2 passkeys before granting access to internal applications and SaaS APIs. The system is distinguished by its secretless access broker, which injects credentials—such as API keys, passwords, and AWS Sigv4 signatures—at the gateway level so users can access databases and cloud resources without managing secrets. It further specializes in AI gateway administration,
Firezone is a zero trust network access platform that uses WireGuard to provide identity-based connectivity to internal network resources. It functions as a virtual private network that synchronizes authentication and user groups via OpenID Connect providers. The system implements a group-based access control engine to enforce least privilege by restricting network resources to specific user groups. It utilizes holepunching and relay protocols for NAT traversal to establish encrypted tunnels through firewalls without requiring inbound ports. The platform includes a control plane for managing
EasyTier is a decentralized peer-to-peer virtual private network and mesh networking tool. It functions as a layer 3 network overlay that establishes secure tunnels between devices without requiring a centralized server or coordinator. It also serves as a WireGuard-compatible VPN, capable of acting as a server for standard WireGuard clients. The project distinguishes itself through multipath latency-based routing and the use of KCP or QUIC proxies to mitigate packet loss and stabilize connections in high-loss environments. It provides a virtual networking manager featuring a web management co
Ziti is a zero-trust network overlay and identity-based mesh network. It provides a software-defined perimeter that replaces traditional IP-based routing and VPNs by mapping network services to cryptographically verified identities, effectively cloaking applications from the public internet. The project distinguishes itself through an outbound-only connection model that eliminates open listening ports and a Zero Trust SDK that allows developers to embed encryption and identity-based access control directly into application source code. It also provides transparent tunneling proxies to extend
Ockam is an end-to-end encryption framework and distributed identity provider designed to establish secure communication between applications and devices. It provides a secure network overlay that utilizes cryptographic identities and attribute-based access control to implement zero trust network access. The project distinguishes itself through metadata-driven multi-hop routing and a pluggable transport layer, allowing encrypted traffic to move across diverse network topologies without requiring virtual IP overlays. It specifically enables secure tunneling for legacy applications by wrapping
Headscale is a self-hosted control plane for private mesh networking that enables the creation of secure, encrypted peer-to-peer networks. By acting as a centralized coordination server, it manages device authentication, cryptographic key exchange, and network topology, allowing distributed infrastructure to communicate without relying on third-party services. It implements a zero-trust security architecture, verifying device and user identity before granting access to internal resources. The project distinguishes itself by providing a fully independent, self-hosted alternative for managing n
zrok is a zero trust networking service that provides a secure overlay mesh to expose local services and files through firewalls and NAT without the need for manual port forwarding. It functions as a zero trust network manager, orchestrating identities, policies, and routers to establish secure connectivity between applications and users. The project distinguishes itself through the use of identity-based routing and hardened HTTP frontends that integrate with external identity providers. These capabilities allow for the creation of identity-aware proxies and secure reverse proxies that authen
Awesome Tunneling is a curated directory of technologies designed to facilitate secure connectivity between distributed devices and local services. It serves as a comprehensive resource for identifying tools that enable remote access, private network creation, and the exposure of local environments to the public internet. The collection focuses on solutions that bypass network address translation and firewall restrictions through techniques such as reverse proxy tunneling, overlay network infrastructure, and peer-to-peer connectivity. It categorizes resources based on their ability to establi
Security-101 is a vendor-agnostic, foundational cybersecurity learning curriculum organized into modular, framework-aligned modules. It is designed to build core knowledge across multiple security domains without tying content to specific products or platforms, making it suitable for both beginners and professionals seeking a structured introduction to the field. The curriculum is built around established security frameworks, including the MITRE ATT&CK framework for standardized threat analysis and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework for incident response workflows. It covers a broad range of do
ZeroTierOne is a software-defined networking engine that creates virtual local area networks by emulating Ethernet switches across distributed devices. It functions as a peer-to-peer platform, establishing encrypted tunnels directly between endpoints to bypass the need for centralized gateways or hub-and-spoke architectures. The system distinguishes itself through a decentralized approach to network discovery and identity management. By utilizing a distributed hash table and public key infrastructure, it authenticates devices and maps virtual addresses to physical endpoints without relying on
This project is a shell-based orchestration tool designed to automate the deployment and administration of WireGuard virtual private network servers on Linux hosts. It functions as a system-level networking utility that handles the installation of kernel modules, the configuration of secure tunnel interfaces, and the management of network routing rules to enable encrypted remote access. The tool provides an interactive command-line interface that simplifies the lifecycle management of network peers. It allows administrators to dynamically add or remove client access profiles, assign custom DN
Authorizer is an open-source identity provider that functions as a centralized authentication and authorization platform. It manages user identities and session lifecycles by implementing standard OpenID Connect protocols, allowing for secure verification across web, mobile, and backend applications. The service is designed as a containerized microservice that provides a unified interface for administrative and authentication operations. The platform distinguishes itself through a multi-tenant architecture that isolates authentication rules and user data across different business domains. It
Ockam is a zero-trust networking framework designed to secure data transit between distributed applications using an identity-based network overlay. It provides the primitives necessary to establish mutually authenticated and end-to-end encrypted connections, removing the reliance on traditional network-layer security. The project is distinguished by its use of attribute-based access control and verifiable credentials to manage trust at scale. It implements cryptographic identity rotation to maintain identity continuity and integrates with hardware-backed key management systems to secure priv
Rathole is a high-performance reverse proxy and NAT traversal tool written in Rust. It functions as a secure tunneling server and client architecture designed to expose local services to the internet by forwarding traffic from a public IP to a private device behind a firewall. The system establishes encrypted tunnels between a public server and a private host to ensure private communication. It utilizes token-based authentication to validate identities between the server and client for each individual service. The project provides TCP and UDP port forwarding and manages private tunnels to fa
SoftEtherVPN is a multi-protocol virtual private network server that provides secure remote access and site-to-site connectivity. It functions as a virtual network gateway, enabling encrypted communication across public internet connections while supporting both Layer 2 Ethernet bridging and Layer 3 IP routing to manage traffic between connected devices. The platform is designed to maintain connectivity in restrictive network environments by bypassing firewalls and NAT devices through techniques such as HTTPS, ICMP, and DNS-based tunneling. It eliminates the requirement for static public IP a
Uncloud is a decentralized container orchestrator designed to deploy and manage applications across multiple servers without a central control plane. It functions as a peer-to-peer system and a Docker Compose cluster deployer, using SSH-based infrastructure management to coordinate operations across remote nodes. The project distinguishes itself by using a secure mesh network overlay to enable direct inter-container communication across different physical machines. It facilitates container image distribution by transferring missing layers directly from local environments to target nodes, bypa
Innernet is a WireGuard VPN mesh orchestrator and control plane that automates the deployment of encrypted tunnels between distributed peers. It functions as a virtual private network that coordinates endpoint discovery and distributes network configurations from a centralized server to establish a private overlay network. The system differentiates itself through a structured peer management lifecycle, using single-use invitation files for secure onboarding and cryptographic key exchange. It provides granular network segmentation by organizing peers into named CIDR blocks, allowing administra
This project is a public key infrastructure management system designed to automate the issuance, renewal, and revocation of X.509, TLS, and SSH certificates. It functions as a machine identity provider and certificate authority, enabling the establishment of private PKI to secure inter-service communication and remote access. The system distinguishes itself through hardware-bound identity attestation, which ties cryptographic keys to physical device silicon or TPMs to prevent credential exfiltration. It supports a wide array of identity verification mechanisms, including OIDC, cloud-provider
MediaCMS is a self-hosted media content management system designed for hosting, organizing, and distributing video, audio, images, and PDF files. It functions as a digital asset management platform that combines a transcoding pipeline with a server capable of delivering adaptive video streaming. The system is distinguished by its automated media transcoding pipeline, which converts uploaded files into multiple resolutions and codecs and generates automatic transcriptions. It integrates SAML and OAuth identity layers to connect external enterprise identity providers for managing user access an
This project is a Kubernetes-based cloud IDE platform that provisions and manages containerized development environments accessible via a web browser. It functions as a multi-tenant developer platform, enabling teams to launch standardized workspaces directly from Git repositories. The platform implements development environments as code, using declarative YAML configurations and DevContainer-compatible specifications to define toolsets, IDE settings, and runtime dependencies. This ensures repeatable setups through reusable environment templates and standardized workspace stacks, allowing for
Talos is a minimal, immutable Linux distribution designed specifically for deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters. It functions as an API-driven infrastructure manager that replaces traditional shell access with a declarative gRPC interface to control operating system state and configuration. The system is distinguished by its use of a read-only root filesystem and a security-hardened kernel, which removes standard GNU utilities to reduce the attack surface. It ensures environment consistency by distributing the operating system as versioned, signed images and utilizes TPM-backed verified
Kubo is a peer-to-peer implementation of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) designed for decentralized data storage and content delivery. It uses content-addressing, directed acyclic graphs, and distributed hash tables to identify, distribute, and retrieve data across a network without relying on central servers. The project differentiates itself by providing a virtual filesystem via FUSE, which maps decentralized network namespaces to local operating system directories for direct file access. It also includes integrated HTTP gateways that translate peer-to-peer content into standard web t
This project is an Android password manager application that provides an end-to-end encrypted vault for storing and synchronizing login credentials, secure notes, and identities. It functions as a secure storage system using zero-knowledge encryption to ensure that only the user can decrypt their stored data. The application integrates directly with the Android system to provide an autofill service that populates usernames and passwords into mobile apps and browser login fields. It also serves as a passkey management wallet for FIDO2 cryptographic passkeys and a time-based one-time password a
Logto is an open-source identity provider that serves as a centralized authentication and authorization server for web, mobile, and command-line applications. It implements the OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.1 standards to handle secure user sign-in and the issuance of identity tokens. The platform is specifically designed as a multi-tenant authentication framework for software-as-a-service environments, featuring built-in organization management and tenant isolation. It includes an enterprise single sign-on gateway to integrate external identity providers and supports role-based access control t
n2n is a peer-to-peer VPN that creates an encrypted mesh network by establishing layer 2 overlay networks. It uses UDP tunneling to connect remote computers into a shared virtual local area network, allowing devices to communicate as if they were on the same physical Ethernet switch. The system utilizes a centralized signaling registry and federated coordination nodes to facilitate peer discovery and node registration. It implements NAT traversal through UDP hole punching and UPnP port mapping, while using supernode relay routing to ensure connectivity when symmetric NATs prevent direct peer-
Polis is a self-hosted identity provider designed to manage federated authentication and user lifecycle operations within private infrastructure. It functions as a centralized hub for identity management, enabling organizations to maintain control over user data while enforcing security policies across diverse environments. The platform distinguishes itself by acting as a protocol-bridging gateway that converts complex enterprise authentication standards, such as SAML and OIDC, into a unified OAuth 2.0 flow. It further automates administrative tasks by synchronizing user and group information