What is Octelium used for?

Octelium is a self-hosted zero trust access platform that can act as a VPN, ZTNA system, API and AI gateway, tunnel service or PaaS on Kubernetes. It is a good fit for replacing a VPN with zero trust access, secure access to homelab services, and gateway for AI agents and MCP servers.

Is Octelium open source?

Yes. Octelium is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at octelium/octelium and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Octelium is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Octelium?

Yes. Octelium can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Octelium an alternative to?

Octelium is an open-source alternative to Tailscale, Twingate, Cloudflare Zero Trust and ngrok. Other open-source alternatives to Tailscale include OpenZiti, Pangolin and Firezone.

Is Octelium actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Octelium was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.43.0, published on 21 September 2026. The project has 4.1k stars on GitHub.

Octelium: open-source alternative to Tailscale, Twingate

About Octelium

Octelium is a self-hosted, open-source platform that unifies zero trust secure access under one system. It is flexible enough to act as a zero-config remote access VPN, a Zero Trust Network Access and BeyondCorp-style platform, an alternative to ngrok and Cloudflare Tunnel, an API gateway, an AI and LLM gateway, and an infrastructure for building MCP gateways and AI agent access.

Repository topics list attribute-based access control, policy as code, WireGuard, QUIC, SSO, multi-factor authentication, OpenTelemetry and SSH access. The README includes use cases, a feature overview, a guide to try it in a Codespace, CLI installation and instructions to install your first cluster. It is written in Go and runs on Kubernetes. It is compared to ngrok, Cloudflare Tunnel and Apigee for different roles.

Octelium is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and you operate the cluster yourself. It suits platform and security teams, homelab users and developers who want to replace several access, tunnel and gateway tools with one self-hosted system.

Key features

Zero-config remote access VPN
ZTNA and BeyondCorp-style access
API, AI and MCP gateway capabilities
Tunnel service as ngrok alternative
Attribute-based policy as code
Runs on Kubernetes clusters

Good fit for

→Replacing a VPN with zero trust access
→Secure access to homelab services
→Gateway for AI agents and MCP servers

Built with: Go; Kubernetes
Tags: zero-trust; ztna; vpn; api-gateway; mcp-gateway; kubernetes; self-hosted; wireguard

Octelium: questions and answers

What is Octelium used for?: Octelium is a self-hosted zero trust access platform that can act as a VPN, ZTNA system, API and AI gateway, tunnel service or PaaS on Kubernetes. It is a good fit for replacing a VPN with zero trust access, secure access to homelab services, and gateway for AI agents and MCP servers.
Is Octelium open source?: Yes. Octelium is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at octelium/octelium and is written mainly in Go.
Is Octelium free?: Yes. Octelium is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Octelium?: Yes. Octelium can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Octelium an alternative to?: Octelium is an open-source alternative to Tailscale, Twingate, Cloudflare Zero Trust and ngrok. Other open-source alternatives to Tailscale include OpenZiti, Pangolin and Firezone.
Is Octelium actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Octelium was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.43.0, published on 21 September 2026. The project has 4.1k stars on GitHub.