Updated August 2026
    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    22k

    Pangolin: Maintenance, Licence and Alternatives

    Identity-aware tunneled reverse proxy with dashboard UI, access control, and WireGuard-based tunnels (alternative to Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale).

    TL;DR • Pangolin • as of August 2026

    Pangolin is an open-source web servers project, with 22k GitHub stars and a health score of 100/100. It committed 5588 times in the last twelve months across 12 of those months, and its status is actively maintained. Licence: AGPL-3.0. It has real momentum, so treat it as a live competitor rather than a stale repository.

    22k
    GitHub stars
    100/100
    Health score
    5588
    Commits (12 mo)
    12/12
    Active months

    Maintenance health

    Status Actively maintained — Committed within the last 45 days.
    Last commit 2026-08-12
    Days since last commit 5
    Commits, last 3 months 835
    Commits, last 12 months 5588
    Months with activity 12 of 12
    Last release 2026-07-30
    Archived No
    Licence AGPL-3.0
    Category Web Servers

    Health score combines commit recency, twelve-month commit volume, months with activity, release recency and archive state. Metadata refreshed August 2026.

    What the licence lets you do

    AGPL-3.0

    Copyleft (GPL, AGPL, MPL): derivative work must stay open. AGPL also covers software offered over a network, which blocks most closed SaaS wrappers.

    This matters most when you plan to sell a hosted version. A permissive licence means anyone — including a competitor with more capital — can do the same, so your defensibility has to come from distribution, support or data, not from the code.

    What Pangolin means for your idea

    Contested · 52/100
    Web Servers category →

    Pangolin is shipping code consistently, so a buyer comparing your product will find a maintained free option. Price and position against the total cost of self-hosting it, not against the paid incumbent's list price.

    Winnable, but differentiation is not optional. Pick one underserved segment and be visibly better for it rather than competing feature-for-feature with a free tool.

    Pangolin: common questions

    Is Pangolin still maintained in 2026?

    Actively maintained. Pangolin recorded 5588 commits over the last twelve months, with activity in 12 of those months and 835 commits in the last quarter. Last commit: 2026-08-12. Last release: 2026-07-30. Committed within the last 45 days.

    Can I use Pangolin commercially?

    Pangolin is published under AGPL-3.0. Copyleft (GPL, AGPL, MPL): derivative work must stay open. AGPL also covers software offered over a network, which blocks most closed SaaS wrappers.

    How crowded is the Web Servers category?

    19 open-source implementations, 14 of them actively maintained, led by Caddy at 75k stars. Saturation score 52/100 — Contested. Several maintained alternatives exist, but no one owns the category.

    Pangolin alternatives in Web Servers

    Caddy

    Web Servers

    75k

    Powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    Apache-2.0

    NGINX

    Web Servers

    31k

    HTTP and reverse proxy server, mail proxy server, and generic TCP/UDP proxy server.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    BSD-2-Clause

    Competing with free? Check the market first.

    IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented startup failures in about two minutes.