Cloudflare Tunnel is free. Unlimited tunnels. Enterprise-grade infrastructure. Global network. It is hard to compete with that on features alone — and ProxyPass does not try to.
Three Areas That Matter
The differences are in three areas that matter for specific customer segments: privacy, jurisdiction, and deployment model.
Privacy: Cloudflare sees your traffic. That is how their products work — DDoS protection, WAF, caching, analytics all require inspecting requests. ProxyPass does not inspect traffic and does not log request content. For CONNECT mode traffic, ProxyPass cannot inspect it even technically — it is opaque encrypted bytes.
Jurisdiction: Cloudflare is a US company subject to US law, including the CLOUD Act. Even data stored in EU data centers can be subject to US government data requests. ProxyPass is operated by an Austrian company, runs on German servers, and is subject exclusively to EU law.
Deployment model: Cloudflare Tunnel requires your domain to use Cloudflare DNS. Your domain's traffic routes through Cloudflare's network. ProxyPass works with any domain setup — your nodes connect to your subdomain on proxypass.cloud, and your existing infrastructure stays untouched.
Features ProxyPass Offers That Cloudflare Does Not
There are also features ProxyPass offers that Cloudflare Tunnel does not:
- The REST Bridge for reaching plain-HTTP devices in a LAN
- File Mount Mode for WebDAV file access
- Per-node API keys
- One-time install keys for secure node registration
- Remote OS restart through the tunnel
- Hardware-bound node IDs
The Honest Assessment
If you are a company with no EU compliance requirements, no privacy concerns about traffic inspection, and you are comfortable routing your domain through Cloudflare — their tunnel is free and powerful. If you are a European business that needs private, inspection-free tunneling on EU infrastructure with fleet management features — ProxyPass is purpose-built for that.