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Comment by kordlessagain | Hacker News Reader

I would rather use ngrok for these things: https://ngrok.com/

The reason why is because Alan is awesome.

Thanks Kord! Founder of ngrok here, just a quick note of correction for others in this thread: ngrok is absolutely intended for production use cases. There are many customers both hobbyist and enterprise running thousands of production workloads over ngrok's service (including ourselves! we dogfood ngrok for our ingress). We're excited to be sharing more about that with the HN community really soon.

As much as it pains me to say it, Cloudflare seems well positioned to eat ngrok's lunch. AFAIK they offer everything ngrok does plus auto TLS certs, CDN, domain name registration, and tons of other features. They also have way more edge servers for terminating tunnels close to the origin devices. And they can afford to do all this for free as a loss leader product. It's the AWS bundling effect. Oh and the client source code is available.

I don't want to see Cloudflare completely take over this space, but Cloudflare Tunnel is tough to compete with.

One knob ngrok could still turn is adding auto TLS certs which are managed on the client side. Then you can offer e2ee which is something Cloudflare will probably never do.

ngrok employee here (and lead on our cert system). Re client side auto certs, it's an interesting idea. We do support auto certs, managed within the ngrok cloud. We also support passing through tls termination to the ngrok agent and/or the user's upstream server so that users can use their own certs (which could be obtained programmatically). We also support end-to-end encryption as well as authentication (via mutual tls).

We've got a lot in the works as well.. thoon, real thoon. ;-)

out of interest - why? They seem to be targeted at different use cases - ngrok for dev work (looking at pricing and the limits on the free tier), and argo tunnels for permanent services

ngrok is easy to use. Is there any advantage of using Cloudflare Tunnel over ngrok?

Cloudflare tunnels also create multiple connections to Cloudflare for increased reliability. See https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo-tunnels-that-live-forever/

ngrok is meant for temporary quick test environments, Cloudflare Tunnel is more of a long-term solution. Although there is https://try.cloudflare.com/ which is designed to be just as quick and easier as ngrok.

Mind elaborating the service trade-offs?

why?

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