ngrok vs VirtualBox: 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, VirtualBox is detailed as "Run nearly any operating system on a single machine and to freely switch between OS instances running simultaneously". VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

ngrok belongs to "localhost Tools" category of the tech stack, while VirtualBox can be primarily classified under "Virtualization Platform".

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, VirtualBox provides the following key features:

• Portability
• No hardware virtualization required
• Guest Additions: shared folders, seamless windows, 3D virtualization

"Easy to use" is the top reason why over 18 developers like ngrok, while over 357 developers mention "Free" as the leading cause for choosing VirtualBox.

ngrok is an open source tool with 16.5K GitHub stars and 2.87K GitHub forks. Here's a link to ngrok's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, VirtualBox has a broader approval, being mentioned in 724 company stacks & 975 developers stacks; compared to ngrok, which is listed in 26 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.