Overview

A Cloudflare alternative for local and cloud use, can be used ontop of cloudflare for cloudflares paid features, but for free! A secure, scalable, and easy-to-use networking solution. The project has 701 GitHub stars and is licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Key Features

Source: GitHub README

Anti-DDoS & WAF — Filters like a hawk. Blocks malicious requests, bots, and common exploits.
Rate Limiting & Request Queuing — Your API won’t get nuked.
Auto SSL & TLS Termination — Free SSL with auto-renew.
Load Balancing & Failover — Multinode routing with zero-downtime.
Real-Time Metrics Dashboard — Monitor traffic, bandwidth, errors, and hits.
Dynamic Rules Engine — Write custom rules in JS/TS to handle routing, caching, filtering, etc.
WebSocket & HTTP/2 Ready — Handles modern protocols like a beast.
Per-Domain Configs — Define behavior per site with regex/wildcard support.
Plugin System — Extend NetGoat with custom plugins or middlewares.
Cloudflare Zero Trust Support — Acts as a trusted upstream in Zero Trust setups.

Getting Started

Source: GitHub README

We recommend datalix for cheap and highly avaliable vps’ses

https://docs.netgoat.xyz (not published yet)

Normalized Features

Source: tool-features-normalized.json

dashboard, metrics, mongodb, plugins, rate limiting, rest api, rules engine, sqlite, ssl tls, websocket.

Deploy

Docker

Self-host with Docker Compose

Coolify

One-click via Coolify panel

Elestio

Managed hosting from $9/mo

PikaPods

Simple managed hosting

Features

Integrations & APIs

Plugin / Extension System
REST API
WebSocket Support

Automation & Workflows

Rules Engine

Analytics & Reporting

Dashboard
Metrics & KPIs

Security & Privacy

Rate Limiting
SSL / TLS / HTTPS

Compare NetGoat

NetGoat vs

Traefik

Both are networking tools. NetGoat has 6 unique features, Traefik has 5.

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