BrowserSync vs ngrok: What are the differences?

What is BrowserSync? Reload all your browsers, every time you hit save. BrowserSync makes your tweaking and testing faster by synchronising file changes and interactions across multiple devices. It’s wicked-fast and totally free.

What is ngrok? Securely expose a local web server to the internet and capture all traffic for detailed inspection and replay. ngrok is a reverse proxy that creates a secure tunnel between from a public endpoint to a locally running web service. ngrok captures and analyzes all traffic over the tunnel for later inspection and replay.

BrowserSync and ngrok are primarily classified as "Live Reloading" and "localhost" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by BrowserSync are:

• Interaction sync
• File sync
• URL history

On the other hand, ngrok provides the following key features:

• Expose any http service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a subdomain of ngrok.com
• Expose any tcp service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a random port of ngrok.com
• Inspect all http requests/responses that are transmitted over the tunnel

BrowserSync and ngrok are both open source tools. It seems that ngrok with 16.5K GitHub stars and 2.87K forks on GitHub has more adoption than BrowserSync with 10.7K GitHub stars and 689 GitHub forks.

Bannerman, a2c systems, and F.biz are some of the popular companies that use ngrok, whereas BrowserSync is used by Reactor Digital, Kriasoft, and Zenfulfillment. ngrok has a broader approval, being mentioned in 26 company stacks & 16 developers stacks; compared to BrowserSync, which is listed in 10 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.