Hello, I just switched my Cloudflare Tunnel container for an open-source alternative, Newt (Pangolin), on my home lab. They are both special reverse proxies that use a secure tunnel to expose your internal services to the internet.

There are a lot of benefits to setting up Pangolin, but it comes with a cost and requires more setup. The biggest drawback is the cost of purchasing a VPS, compared to Cloudflare Tunnel, where you just need to have a domain name.

The setup isn’t bad at all, and I found an amazing guide from Jeremy that made it incredibly simple. So while this won’t be a setup guide, I did want to bring more attention to this project. It’s everything you could love about an open-source project: better performance and better security. While Pangolin itself is amazing, using a cloud service provider comes with inherent risks.

Key Differences

Let’s consider the key differences between Cloudflare Tunnel and Pangolin (Newt):

Last modified on 2025-08-11