An alternative to Cloudflare Tunnel: Orbit Link
Orbit Link: serve a site from a machine with no public address: a connector dials out and the edge serves your hostname through it.
What Cloudflare Tunnel does well
Cloudflare Tunnel connects a resource that has no publicly routable address: cloudflared dials out through your firewall, traffic then flows both ways over the tunnel, and the origin can block every inbound connection. It reaches a network with data centres in 348 cities.
At a glance
| Item | Orbit Link | Cloudflare Tunnel |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A connector at the origin dials out; the Orbit edge serves your site through it | Outbound-only connections from your origin to Cloudflare's network, through the cloudflared daemon; no public address needed |
| Who runs it | Hosted on Orbit; your own hostname, served through Shield | Hosted by Cloudflare; cloudflared runs next to your origin |
| Free option | 1 tunnel, free for non-commercial use | Not covered on the pages linked below |
Cloudflare Tunnel details are from Cloudflare Tunnel's own page 1, Cloudflare Tunnel's own page 2 as of 2026-09; terms change, so check there for the current ones.
Where Orbit fits
If your sites are already behind Cloudflare, Tunnel is the natural choice. Orbit Link is for serving a hostname through Shield from a machine with no public address, with its DNS and edge rules in the same Orbit console.