Ngrok is an ingress-as-a-service tool that provides tunnels for instant access to your apps on any cloud, private network, or device. It allows you to share your website or app from localhost and supports use cases like connecting to IoT devices behind NAT/firewalls, receiving webhooks, and debugging HTTP requests. Recently, Ngrok expanded to include API gateways, firewalls, and load balancing for on-premise apps. Despite its maturity, Ngrok can be complex.

This article explores the top 10 Ngrok alternatives for 2024, covering their features, installation processes, ease of use, and pricing to help you choose the best option.

1. Pinggy

Pinggy.io is a tunneling tool that provides a public address to access your localhost, even behind a NAT or firewall, with a single command. We do not need to download anything either. This Ngrok alternative allows users to access their website or app hosted on localhost without needing to configure the cloud, port forwarding, DNS, or VPN.

For example, to share a React app running on localhost:3000, you can use Pinggy with the following command:

ssh -p 443 -R0:localhost:3000 a.pinggy.io

Here is a video tutorial:

Pinggy supports all advanced features such as web-debugger, custom domains, TCP tunnels, IP Whitelisting, Key Authentication, Password authentication, etc. Overall, Pinggy is the best ngrok alternative from a feature as well as value for money perspective.

2. Localtunnel

Localtunnel is an alternative to Ngrok that is available as an npm package. It enables the creation of HTTP/HTTPS tunnels to localhost and generates a random subdomain when run from the terminal. As a Node.js package, Localtunnel can be integrated into your applications as a library, making it useful for testing your Node.js apps.

3. Localtonet

The advantage of Localtonet is that it offers UDP tunnels as well. Users can use UDP tunnels to host multiplayer games on localhost. It also offers features like custom subdomains, password protection, and usage analytics to enhance security and usability. Designed to be user-friendly, Localtonet is ideal for developers who need a reliable and straightforward solution for exposing local applications to the web.