// the take
Pangolin is a self-hostable SASE/zero-trust platform that bundles a WireGuard-based VPN, an identity-aware reverse proxy, privileged access management, and an AI gateway for LLM traffic under one policy model. It's aimed at admins who currently stitch together a VPN, a reverse proxy, and an SSO layer separately and want one thing to run instead, as an open alternative to Cloudflare One or Zscaler.
The NAT traversal design is the real selling point: a lightweight userspace connector (`newt`) dials out from behind any firewall, so you get inbound access to private networks without opening ports or needing a public IP — genuinely useful for homelab and branch-office setups. Building on WireGuard for the tunnel layer instead of rolling custom crypto is the right call. The AI gateway is a real differentiator, not a bolted-on feature: it puts budgets, per-session logging, and model routing in front of both cloud and self-hosted LLM endpoints, which is something most ZTNA products don't touch. In-browser SSH/RDP/VNC through the proxy with PAM controls means you can give someone scoped access without shipping them a client or a shared credential.
It's open-core (AGPL-3 for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise) — several things referenced in the README (advanced RBAC, HA, certain IdP sync features) are gated behind the paid tier, so check the license split before assuming self-hosting gets you the full feature set. The surface area is large: VPN, reverse proxy, PAM, SSO, and an AI gateway all running as one system means a vulnerability or misconfiguration in any one subsystem has a blast radius across all of them — this is not something to stand up without someone owning it operationally. The reference deployment ships Traefik and CrowdSec as separate containers alongside the core app, so 'self-host Pangolin' is really 'run and patch a small stack,' not a single binary. HA is documented as a manual multi-node reference config rather than a built-in clustering mode, so production HA takes real setup work, not a flag.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →