Open Source Alternatives
Open Source Networking Alternatives to Cloudflare Access
Zero-trust access control that puts a login in front of internal apps and SSH.
Cloudflare Access is a trademark of its respective owner.
Updated May 2026
What you gain
- ✓Self-hosted identity-aware proxy with no per-seat pricing as your team grows
- ✓Access policies and audit logs stay inside your own network
- ✓WireGuard-based access you fully control, no dependency on Cloudflare's edge
- ✓No vendor lock-in on how users reach internal services
What you give up
- △You lose Cloudflare's global edge enforcing access close to the user
- △No turnkey pairing with Cloudflare Tunnel to expose apps without open ports
- △You run and patch the access gateway and its identity connectors yourself
- △Smaller library of prebuilt identity-provider integrations
Switching Cost
Cloudflare Access ties identity to Cloudflare's edge; self-hosting moves that gateway onto your own box. Firezone and Octelium both do identity-aware access with WireGuard underneath, so the concepts map cleanly. A small team can replace basic SSO-gated app access in a day or two. The work is wiring your identity provider (Google, Okta, GitHub) back in and recreating per-app policies. The hidden cost is that Access enforces at Cloudflare's edge near the user, while a self-hosted gateway sits wherever you run it, so latency and high availability are now yours to design.
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Drop-in Replacements
Ranked by feature coverage
firezone
7570% coverageEnterprise-ready zero-trust access platform built on WireGuard®.
Firezone is a zero-trust remote access platform built on WireGuard. Group-based policies replace the all-or-nothing VPN model: each resource (host, subnet, service) has its own access rules, and users only see what they are allowed to reach.
octelium
6360% coverageA next-gen FOSS self-hosted unified zero trust secure access platform that can operate as a remote access VPN, a ZTNA platform, API/AI/MCP gateway, a PaaS, an ngrok-alternative and a homelab infrastructure.
Octelium is a self-hosted zero trust platform that replaces your VPN, your reverse proxy, and your access gateway in one shot. Instead of "connect to the network and hope firewall rules hold," every request gets identity-checked at the application layer.
AWS Cognito