Warpgate vs Teleport

Warpgate is a self-hosted bastion and privileged access gateway that proxies SSH, HTTPS, Kubernetes, MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDP and VNC connections to internal targets. Users connect with their normal clients or through a browser-based terminal and desktop client, so no agent or SSH wrapper is installed on the client side. It ships as a single binary or a Docker image, keeps state in a database, and provides an admin web UI for managing targets, users, roles and session replay. RDP and VNC target support arrived in v0.27.0, published on 1 August 2026.

Pros

• Apache-2.0 licensed with no paid tier; the GitHub repository records 7,446 stars, 323 forks and releases through v0.27.2 on 3 August 2026, which indicates ongoing maintenance
• No client-side software is required: an independent setup guide states it forwards connections straight to the target rather than acting as a jump host
• One gateway covers interactive shells, Kubernetes, databases and, since v0.27.0, recorded RDP and VNC desktop sessions
• Deploys as a single binary or Docker image, with clustering and S3 recording storage documented for multi-node setups

Things to check

Pricing:

Teleport is a modern infrastructure access platform that unifies SSH, Kubernetes, database, and application access behind a single identity-aware proxy. It replaces VPNs, bastion hosts, and shared credentials with short-lived certificates tied to SSO identity. Teleport is open source at its core (Apache 2.0), with a commercial Enterprise tier that adds FedRAMP support, IdP hosting, and advanced policies. It is popular with DevOps and SRE teams operating at cloud-native scale.

Pros

• Excellent developer experience; cloud-native design
• Open source core with strong enterprise tier
• Short-lived certs eliminate shared credentials and password sprawl
• Broad protocol support (SSH, K8s, DB, apps) in one tool

Things to check

• Enterprise features require the paid tier
• Complex to operate at scale without dedicated SREs
• Self-hosted HA setup requires Postgres/etcd expertise
• Smaller integration catalog than legacy PAM vendors

Pricing: Community edition free for companies under 100 employees and under $10M revenue. AWS Marketplace entry $50,000/yr (25-user minimum, 2026); usage-based quote (active users, workloads, resources) otherwise.