Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Pico: An open-source Ngrok alternative built for production traffic
Pico is an open-source alternative to Ngrok. Unlike most other open-source tunnelling solutions, Pico is designed to serve production traffic and be simple to host (particularly on Kubernetes). Upstream services connect to Pico and register endpoints. Pico will then route requests for an endpoint to a registered upstream service via its outbound-only connection. This means you can expose your services without opening a public port. Pico runs as a cluster of nodes in order to be fault tolerant, scale horizontally and support zero downtime deployments. It is also easy to host, such as a…
Pico is an open-source tunneling solution designed for production workloads, offering an alternative to Ngrok. It allows upstream services to register endpoints and route traffic through outbound-only connections… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Pico: An open-source Ngrok alternative built for production traffic launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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ngrok is developer infrastructure that routes and secures traffic to your apps, APIs, and AI models, wherever they run. Start on localhost, ship to prod.
2013 · ngrok.com · its alternatives →
- 2PD
PicoMQ is a Rust server for Durable Streams, built on Object Store. Cheap, URL-addressable, granular streams (create/append/read/long-poll/SSE), with Pico Protocol or Durable Streams Protocol as the facade. S3Stream is the stream storage primitive, used in AutoMQ, shipped as a Rust library. Coordination is a command log in Postgres.
Aug 2026 · picomq.com · its alternatives →
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Expose local http, tcp or websocket connections to the public internet - amalshaji/portr
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
A large part of our (Real Kinetic's) business is helping organizations implement platform engineering, but we've found the existing tooling to be lacking. For IaC, Terraform state becomes a pain because TF treats infrastructure as "one-shot" commands. The Kubernetes controller model provides a nicer approach to managing infrastructure, but the tooling here is also lacking. For configuration management, Helm just doesn't really scale with complexity, nor does Kustomize. For resource orchestration, Crossplane is a step in the right direction but still has challenges and limitations. As a…
2025 · koreo.dev · its alternatives →
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tunnelto.dev▲186Expose localhost to the internet with a public URL
2020 · tunnelto.dev · its alternatives →
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coolLabs: Software without compromise. Free, open source, and built for you.
2021 · coollabs.io · its alternatives →
- 7
A flexible Rule-Based Proxy. Contribute to pichi-router/pichi development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Revenue tools for the modern publisher
2017 · hellopico.io · its alternatives →
- 11
Scalable open source pub/sub SDK with support for RPC, JWT authentication and Kubernetes — optimized for async/await
2016 · socketcluster.io · its alternatives →
- 12AS
This is a proof of concept utility which allows you to expose local services to the internet at large: https://github.com/skx/tunneller In short it is a simple ngrok alternative, which you can self-host. Because it is a proof of concept it hasn't been tested extensively, but it seems like it will solve my immediate-needs. Of course it needs test, and structure added. But feedback can't hurt :)
2019 · its alternatives →
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Greetings! We are excited to announce pipe: our managed pubsub service over ssh. We are at a point where we would love to get feedback on the service to see if it resonates with the HN crowd. All you need to use `pipe` is a pico account which can be created using ssh: `ssh pico.sh` We've been using it internally for a few weeks now and keep coming up with new use cases. For example, we are using `pipe` to create a log drain for all of our services and even a way to share logs with users. You can read more about it on our blog post: https://blog.pico.sh/pubsub
2024 · pipe.pico.sh · its alternatives →
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Get your localhost app online in an instant, no api keys or login required.
2023 · hello.ports.live · its alternatives →
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Per-executable network bandwidth monitoring for Linux
2022 · elesiuta.github.io · its alternatives →
- 17
Hello HN, we're Philip and Louis from Glasskube (https://github.com/glasskube/glasskube). We're working on an open-source package manager for Kubernetes. It's an alternative to tools like Helm or Kustomize, primarily focused on making deploying, updating, and configuring Kubernetes packages simpler and a lot faster. Here is a demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIeTHGWsG2c#t=17s) with quick start instructions. Most developers working with Kubernetes use Helm, an open-source tool created during a hackathon nine years ago. However, with the rapid…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Expose your local web server to the internet with a public URL
2020 · tunnelto.dev · its alternatives →
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Kerno▲132Hey HN! Anibal, Sean, Vlad, Maxi and Karim here we're the co-founders of Kerno (https://www.kerno.io/). We're building a zero-hassle tool to help developers monitor and troubleshoot their services in a way that makes sense. No complex rollouts, no custom infra, no tons of instrumentation, no sidecars… none of that! Just a minimum effort, out-of-the box, highly contextualized and interactive experience so you and your team can focus on shipping! We basically scan your cluster resources, build usable abstractions on top of all the kubernetes craziness, identify monitor your…
Dec 2025 · kerno.io · its alternatives →
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Self-hosting platform with superpowers. Deploy apps, databases & 280+ services to your server. Open-source alternative to Heroku.
2022 · coolify.io · its alternatives →
- 21
Pico▲173The farm in your palm that self-waters and illuminates!
2020 · indiegogo.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hey folks, we built a Kubernetes operator for Renovate and wanted to share it. Instead of running Renovate as a cron job or relying on hosted services, this operator lets you manage it as a native Kubernetes resource with CRDs. You define your repos and config declaratively, and the operator handles scheduling and execution inside your cluster. No external dependencies, no SaaS lock-in, no webhook setup. The whole thing is open source and will stay that way – there's no paid tier or monetization plan behind it, we just needed this ourselves and figured others might too. Would love to hear…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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kubectl port-forward manager and reverse tunnel (ngrok-like) for exposing local services publicly, with TLS termination, HTTP traffic inspection, UDP forwarding, multi-hop proxy routing through k8s clusters, stateful config via filesystem or git - GUI and TUI available - hcavarsan/kftray
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Globally distributed Ingress Controller that works anywhere
2023 · ngrok.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- ngrok – secure introspectable tunnels to localhost alternatives
- PicoMQ – Durable Streams over HTTP, on object storage alternatives
- Portr – open-source ngrok alternative designed for teams alternatives
- Koreo – A platform engineering toolkit for Kubernetes alternatives
- tunnelto.dev alternatives
- An open-source, self-hostable Heroku and Netlify alternative alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →