alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Pangolin: Open-source identity-based VPN (Twingate/Zscaler alternative)
Pangolin (https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin) is an open-source tool for identity-based remote access to internal resources - an alternative to Cloudflare ZTNA, Zscaler, and Twingate.
It’s different than existing approaches: mesh VPNs (Tailscale, ZeroTier, etc.) create flat overlay networks where ACL and IP space management becomes complex at scale and every device can talk to every other device, while corporate ZTNA solutions (Zscaler, Cato, Netskope etc.) are closed-source and add latency by forcing traffic through a central server.
Pangolin takes a resource-centric approach. You deploy lightweight connectors that bridge to specific resources (private web apps, SSH, databases, CIDR ranges). Admins delegate resource-access to specific users and roles. It uses WireGuard with NAT hole-punching for peer-to-peer connections and traffic goes directly between the user and connector instead of through a central server. It supports native clients (Mac/Windows/Linux/iOS/Android) plus identity-aware, browser-based access when a client isn’t required.
Pangolin has a cloud and is optionally self-hosted. The Community Edition is AGPLv3. The Enterprise Edition is also open-source under the commercial license which enables free personal/small business use.
Everything, from the server to the clients, is fully open-source and you can even self-host the whole stack. We’d love to hear what you think and I'm happy to answer any questions!
Comments
Co-maintainer here: we also did this cool thing where we reused the same go codebase across our clients. We have a go package called olm (on our Github and following our animal theme) that implements all of the VPN capabilities. It creates the tunnel, monitors the peers, syncs with the Pangolin server. This itself is a binary that can run on its own as like our own little VPN kernel module - then in the different applications we use olm to trigger the tunnel. This is easy on Windows as the whole app is go based, but on Android, Mac, and iOS we use C bindings to compile it as a shared library into the application. Then the native application imports parts of the module to initiate the tunnel and handle the tunneling. On iOS and Macos this is handled in a "Network Extension" which is a secure environment Apple runs tunneling applications in, so we use a unix socket to communicate with the olm tunneling kernel to show status to the user and handle commands.
Congrats on progress.
These are differentiating from most VPN and zero trust:
+ fully self-hostable open source
+ avoid ACL complexity (default closed architecture)
+ sovereign identity-based
OpenZiti is similar in those – how do you compare and contrast the two since very few others share those differentiators (I am an OZ maintainer)?
I was thinking of using this to tunnel all of my public sites, do hide my home ip. But in the end whats the issue of showing my home ip? The attack surface stays the same. I just reverse proxy everything through Caddy.
Also weren’t some feature gated behind the cloud version? An appeal for this to replace cloudflare tunnels and tailscale funnel is the _fully_ opensource aspect
Really cool product, impressive how much you've built and the usage you've attained in a short period of time
Thank you, great product, can only recommend it! I've been self-hosting it since last year to access my jellyfin home-server from the web. Set up was easy and I never had any issues.
I replaced CF tunnels, which kept disconnecting every few minutes with it, and happy.
I never personally tried it but it looks great. My only concern is I have a feeling that in few years it will “discontinue” the open source or community version and now it’s paid only, after it gained all the publicity from free open source users, and there are many cases of this scenario that happened before.
Is this there any kubernetes integration? I like the resource based approach; it would be neat to host or consume resources in kubernetes with this.
> The Enterprise Edition is also open-source under the commercial license which enables free personal/small business use.
Open Source can be pair or commercial. But the license of these software Enterprise Edition, called "Fossorial Commercial License", is not Open Source. You tell who and how can use the software after the share/sell and call it Open Source.
The main site also advertises "Self Host: Enterprise Edition" as being "100% Open Source" which is simply not true and false advertising.
I've maintained this list the last several years: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
Pangolin has quickly risen almost to the top since being released. It's very well loved by /r/selfhosted.