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Set beside what you already use
Nobody adopts a tool in a vacuum — there is always an incumbent, and usually a good one. These are the structural differences, written so you can rule one of ours out quickly rather than discover the problem after installing it.
The right-hand columns describe what each project documents publicly about itself, and they describe architecture and licensing rather than feature lists, because those are what stay true between releases. If something here is out of date or wrong, say so and it gets corrected. Tell us what is wrong here.
MangoSSH vs Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager
Both are one window for every machine you have to reach. They differ most in where a team's shared state lives, and in how much the platform you run on changes what you get.
| Aspect | MangoSSH | Devolutions RDM |
|---|---|---|
| Protocols | SSH, RDP, VNC, SFTP, FTP, Telnet, serial consoles, kubectl and a local shell, each spoken by the app itself. | A large catalogue of connection types and third-party integrations, built up over many years. |
| The RDP client | A canvas client drawn inside the MangoSSH window — no external mstsc or xfreerdp process to manage. | Uses the platform's own RDP components on Windows. |
| Across platforms | One codebase on Windows, macOS and Linux, with the same features on each. | The Windows client is the most complete; the macOS and Linux clients cover less of it. |
| Where a team's shared state lives | A vault server and a relay you run, both downloads on this site. There is no hosted service in the path and no account with us. | Shared vaults through Devolutions Server on your own hardware, or Devolutions Hub as a hosted service, plus many third-party data sources. |
| Air-gapped networks | A separate build with the outbound code absent from the binary, not merely switched off. | Can be run entirely on-premises with Devolutions Server. |
| Price | Free for individuals and self-hosters, with no feature held back. $10 per user per month for a company. | A free edition for individual use; per-user licensing for teams. |
| Maturity | New, small, and used by far fewer people. There is no community to search when you get stuck — only us. | Two decades of releases, a large installed base and an established support organisation. |
If your estate is mostly Windows and you want the broadest integration catalogue with a vendor behind it, RDM is the safer answer and has been for years. MangoSSH is the better fit when the same experience has to work on all three platforms, when nothing may leave your network, or when an air-gapped build matters.
MangoFly vs NetBird
Both build a WireGuard mesh where devices talk straight to each other and a coordination server only introduces them. They differ in how much of it you are expected to run, and in where identity comes from.
| Aspect | MangoFly | NetBird |
|---|---|---|
| The control plane | One Rust binary and a SQLite file. It distributes keys, addresses and candidates, holds no private keys, and never carries traffic. | A management server and a signal server, with Coturn for relaying, all self-hostable. |
| Hosted option | None. You run the coordination server or you do not use it. | A managed cloud with a free tier, or self-host the whole stack. |
| Signalling | ICE candidate payloads are sealed with X25519 against the peers' own WireGuard keys before the server ever sees them. | A dedicated signal server brokers the exchange between peers. |
| NAT traversal | ICE hole punching with no public STUN server, ever; the fallback relay is authenticated and yours. | Ships Coturn for STUN and TURN; the managed service provides relays. |
| Identity | Local users and roles, argon2-hashed. LDAP or Active Directory on Enterprise. | External identity providers are the main path — Google, Entra, Okta, Keycloak, Auth0 and others. |
| TLS | The server terminates TLS from PEM files you supply. Your own CA, or a self-signed certificate it mints with the names you will actually use. No ACME. | The install script provisions a public certificate for you. |
| Clients | Windows, macOS and Linux, with a headless daemon for machines that have no desktop. | Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and Docker. |
| Maturity | Single tenant, and the ICE path is new. | Open source under BSD-3-Clause, widely deployed, with a large community and public issue tracker. |
NetBird is open source, further along, and has mobile clients MangoFly does not. Choose MangoFly when you want the smallest possible thing to operate — one binary and one file — and when you would rather the coordination server could not read your signalling even if it wanted to.
MangoScreen vs RustDesk
Both share a screen by numeric ID with no port forwarding, going peer-to-peer where the network allows and through a relay where it does not.
| Aspect | MangoScreen | RustDesk |
|---|---|---|
| Rendezvous | A relay you run. There is no hosted one, so nothing pairs until you have stood one up — or you use Direct IP on a network you already share. | Public ID and relay servers by default, with self-hosting available. |
| Pairing | A nine-digit Device ID and a six-digit password, PAKE-authenticated. Five wrong guesses locks it until the host regenerates. | A numeric ID with a one-time or permanent password. |
| Direct path | Tried first on every pairing, over QUIC, with automatic relay fallback. | Tried first, with relay fallback. |
| If it falls back | Relay frames are sealed with keys from the pairing, in both directions. The operator moves ciphertext. | Relayed traffic is encrypted end to end. |
| Alongside it | The same relay and the same pairing carry RDP from MangoSSH, so a Windows machine needs no port open for either. | Its own protocol, with generic TCP tunnelling alongside it. |
| Clients | Windows, macOS and Linux, either end. No mobile or browser client. | Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and a browser client. |
| Screens | The primary monitor. | All monitors, switchable. |
| Price | Free to use. | Open source, AGPL-3.0. |
RustDesk is mature and does several things this does not — the rows above say which. The case for MangoScreen is narrower: the only machine brokering any of it is one you own, and the same relay already serves your SSH and RDP.
MangoDock vs Portainer
Both are a browser UI in front of your Docker hosts. The decision that separates them was taken early: what, if anything, has to be installed on a host before you can manage it.
| Aspect | MangoDock | Portainer |
|---|---|---|
| Reaching a host | An ordinary SSH session — a direct-streamlocal channel to the remote socket. Also a local socket, a named pipe, TCP with mutual TLS, or plain TCP. | The Portainer Agent on each environment, a direct socket or API endpoint, or the Edge Agent for remote sites. |
| On the managed host | Nothing. A host you can already SSH to is a host you can already manage, and there is nothing to uninstall later. | An agent, for most remote setups. |
| Orchestrators | Docker only. | Docker, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes. |
| Compose, git and scanning | Shells out to real docker compose, real git and real Trivy or Grype, then reads back what they printed — so the result is what those tools would have done on the host. | Its own stack deployment and GitOps implementation, with its own integrations. |
| Vulnerability scanning | Trivy or Grype, with the image source pinned on both so an unreachable host fails loudly instead of returning a clean report on somebody else's image. | Not part of Portainer CE. |
| Volume backups | A helper container on the host that owns the volume pushes straight to your destination, in restic's format. MangoDock only ever sees the exit code. | Portainer's own backup covers its configuration; container volumes are left to other tools. |
| Air-gapped networks | One signed bundle carries the images and fresh vulnerability databases across. Offline, a database is used however old it is and its age is shown. | Runs offline; there is no scanner database to carry across. |
| Database | SQLite by default in the data volume, or PostgreSQL by pointing MANGODOCK_DATABASE_URL at it — every migration is written dialect-neutral for exactly that. | An embedded BoltDB. |
| Price | Free for individuals, self-hosters and non-enterprise use today. | Community Edition is open source; Business Edition is commercial and free for a small number of nodes. |
Portainer manages Kubernetes and Swarm and MangoDock does not, and its community is far larger. MangoDock is the better answer when you have plain Docker hosts you can already SSH to, when installing an agent on each one is the part you were trying to avoid, or when the network they live on has no way out.