head to head · open source
tinyauth vs pgrok
tinyauth has 8,506 GitHub stars, 293 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped today. pgrok has 3,645 stars, 134 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped today. tinyauth leads on adoption by 133% (8,506 vs 3,645 stars). tinyauth is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; pgrok is written in Go under MIT. tinyauth has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, pgrok 4%. tinyauth was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (oidc, sso), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| tinyauth | pgrok | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.5K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-14 | 2026-11-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 293 | ⑂ 134 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick tinyauth if
- You weight community size — 8.5K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pgrok if
- You want the pgrok feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pgrok fits your workflow better
About tinyauth
Tinyauth The tiniest OpenID Certified™ authorization and authentication server you have ever seen. Tinyauth is the simplest and tiniest authentication and authorization server you have ever seen. It is designed to both work as an authentication middleware for your apps, offering support for OAuth, LDAP and access controls, and as a standalone authentication server. It supports all the popular proxies like Traefik, Nginx and Caddy. [!WARNING] Tinyauth is in active development and configuration may change often. Please make sure to carefully read the release notes before updating. [!NOTE] This is the main…
read the full tinyauth overview →
About pgrok
Programmable Networking What? pgrok is a self hosted, multi tenant networking platform for exposing HTTP services and raw TCP connections through SSH reverse tunnels. Run it on your own infrastructure with your own domain and OIDC compatible SSO provider. Users sign in through your team's SSO to obtain their tunnel credentials and stable HTTP subdomains. Use the pgrok CLI to create tunnels, choose predictable subdomains, and route HTTP requests to different local services by path—or connect with a standard SSH client. Why? Stable subdomains and SSO are two things too expensive. Why not just pick one from the…
read the full pgrok overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is tinyauth or pgrok more popular?
tinyauth has 8,506 GitHub stars and pgrok has 3,645. tinyauth has the larger community by that measure.
Are tinyauth and pgrok free?
Both are open source. tinyauth is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pgrok under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between tinyauth and pgrok?
tinyauth is written in Go and pgrok in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, tinyauth or pgrok?
Choose tinyauth if you want the larger community (8,506 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pgrok if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.