ngrok vs PageKite: What are the differences?

Developers describe ngrok as "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. On the other hand, PageKite is detailed as "Make local websites or SSH servers publicly accessible in mere seconds". PageKite is a system for exposing localhost servers to the public Internet. It is most commonly used to make local web servers or SSH servers publicly visible, although almost any TCP-based protocol can work if the client knows how to use an HTTP proxy.

ngrok and PageKite belong to "localhost Tools" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by ngrok are:

• 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

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

• Let colleagues and clients test or remote-debug directly off your computer.
• Simplify testing on mobile devices and live networks.
• Run webhooks, API servers or git repos on your desktop - or in a VM.

ngrok and PageKite are both open source tools. It seems that ngrok with 16.4K GitHub stars and 2.84K forks on GitHub has more adoption than PageKite with 492 GitHub stars and 90 GitHub forks.