As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates GoodAccess 3/5 and Twingate 3/5 in Business VPN & Zero Trust Access. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 1 of the 6 judges picks GoodAccess and 5 pick Twingate. GoodAccess scores higher on 1 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency). Twingate scores higher on 6 of 7 criteria (Architecture, reliability & security assurance, Deployment, API & administration, European sovereignty, plus 3 more). Provenance — GoodAccess: EU-Made; Twingate: Rest of world. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
The split is the story. Twingate's mean is higher on six criteria, GoodAccess on one. Twingate leads deployment and administration (7.0 vs 5.5, six judges lean Twingate), architecture and assurance (6.7 vs 5.0, six lean Twingate), identity and policy (8.0 vs 7.2, five lean Twingate, one tie) and sovereignty (3.8 vs 2.8, four lean Twingate, two tie); access and connectivity (7.0 vs 6.8) and visibility and audit (6.8 vs 6.7) each draw five ties. GoodAccess takes pricing transparency, 6.5 vs 3.3, with six judges leaning GoodAccess and zero leaning Twingate: its captured pages give different figures for the Premium per-user price, $11 and $14, while we found no public per-user price for Twingate. Weighted totals favor Twingate on five judges; the panel's skeptic has GoodAccess ahead, 6 vs 5.9. Each listed sovereignty attribute reads unknown for both. No overall winner is declared.
Choose GoodAccess if
You need to compute an annual cost from what is published — pricing transparency leans GoodAccess, 6.5 vs 3.3 (six judges to zero), and we found no public per-user price for Twingate.
Your procurement team requires a published per-user price to shortlist a vendor — the captured pages show one for GoodAccess Premium, though they give different figures for it, $11 and $14.
You need dedicated gateways with static IPs in 35+ locations at a published price — access and connectivity is close (6.8 vs 7.0, five judges tie) and pricing transparency leans GoodAccess.
You need logs with published fields streaming to your SIEM alongside a published price — visibility and audit draws five ties (6.7 vs 6.8) and pricing transparency leans GoodAccess.
Your priorities match the panel's skeptic — the one weighted total that favors GoodAccess, 6 vs 5.9.
Choose Twingate if
You need authentication delegated to your own identity provider, posture checks reading CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Intune and Jamf, and re-authentication windows from one hour to 31 days — identity and policy is 8.0 vs 7.2, five judges lean Twingate, one tie.
Your team owns day-to-day deployment and administration — the criterion stands at 7.0 vs 5.5, six judges lean Twingate.
You weigh architecture and assurance evidence heavily — it stands at 6.7 vs 5.0, six judges lean Twingate; the verdict notes the security whitepaper sits behind a lead-capture form.
You need documented clarity on data transfers before signing — sovereignty leans Twingate 3.8 vs 2.8 (four judges, two ties); its privacy policy acknowledges transfers of EEA, UK and Swiss personal data outside those regions, while we found no public information for GoodAccess on where account data and logs are stored or processed.
Your role matches the panel's IT lead, devops engineer, MSP technician, operations manager or security officer — weighted totals favor Twingate in each case: 6.2 vs 5.9, 6.7 vs 5.8, 6.3 vs 5.9, 6.3 vs 5.8, 6.5 vs 5.7.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The DevOps Engineer
Platform engineer at a sixty-person software company with servers at Hetzner, a Kubernetes cluster on AWS and a bastion host everyone shares a key for. Wants a mesh that reaches every server and cluster without inbound ports, access policies kept in Git and applied with Terraform, SSH access tied to the identity provider, connectors that run as containers, and a published architecture that says what the vendor's relays can see.
GoodAccess
Twingate
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Access model & connectivity
GoodAccess
One-click clients cover Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and Chrome OS with OpenVPN/IKEv2 protocol defaults, split tunnelling, forced always-on and persistent connect-at-startup; dedicated gateways with unique static IPs sit in 35+ locations, and Cloud & Branch connectors speak IPsec, IKEv2 or OpenVPN into AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OVHcloud. Access Cards give per-application rather than whole-network access, and gateway assignment picks the lowest-latency location automatically. We found no public information on peer-to-peer mesh with relay fallback, connectors for Kubernetes, private or split DNS, clientless browser access for contractors, or connectors running as containers.
Twingate
Connectors deploy as Docker containers, a Helm chart, ECS Fargate, an AWS AMI or a systemd service behind the firewall, hold only outbound connections to relays, and no inbound ports are required — that reaches our Hetzner fleet and the AWS cluster exactly the way I want. Access is per resource by FQDN or IP with peer-to-peer preferred and relays as fallback, DNS for protected resources resolved locally through the connector, and clients for macOS, Windows, Linux, Chrome, iOS and Android. I found no public information naming relay or gateway regions, on always-on or auto-connect behaviour, or on per-gateway throughput, which holds it below the top of this range.
Identity, access policy & device posture
GoodAccess
Single sign-on is documented for nine-plus providers including Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace and universal SAML, backed by SCIM provisioning, enforced MFA with PIN and biometrics, and least-privilege per-app Access Cards assignable to groups. The device posture engine is the standout: thirteen restriction types from disk encryption and antivirus to registry keys and running processes, rechecked every five minutes with non-compliant devices disconnected on policy change, plus time-based PIM/PAM permissions. We found no public information on policies kept as code, approval-based just-in-time workflows, or posture data sourced from EDR/MDM tools.
Twingate
Authentication is always delegated to an identity authority, Google Workspace works on every plan with other providers on Business and Enterprise, and disconnecting a provider strips its users and groups — that is the leaver story I need. Policies combine authentication, device security and location requirements per resource, least-privilege ACLs are generated for both client and connector, device posture pulls from CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Intune, Jamf and Kandji, and access requests with approval and usage-based locking are real API operations alongside a re-authentication window from one hour to thirty-one days. Everything in the policy model is reachable through the Terraform provider so my Git workflow holds; directory sync is described without the SCIM label, and I found no public information on continuous in-session re-evaluation of identity or device state.
Logs, audit trail & incident response
GoodAccess
Gateway access, system, admin, threat-blocker and device-posture logs are documented with their fields (user account ID, source and target IP, timestamp, data volume), streamable via syslog with TLS in JSON to named SIEMs including Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk in one-minute intervals, with the API able to trigger actions such as blocking a user. Retention is stated per plan — 90 days on Essential and Premium, custom on Enterprise — a real-time view of active users and devices exists, and the vendor states access logs are not available to anyone but the customer. We found no public information on retention of a year or more, alerts beyond posture-failure email notifications, or full export in an open, documented format.
Twingate
Audit logs cover create, edit, delete and connect events across users, groups, devices, policies and resources, export as JSON from the admin console or sync to an S3 bucket, and the JSON schema is published in full. Streaming to Datadog, syslog and Vector — and through Vector to Splunk, Elasticsearch and others — plus real-time connection logs from the connectors gives me a workable SIEM path, and connector offline/online email alerts exist. I found no public information on retention periods per plan, on filtering logs by user, device and resource, or on alerts for unusual access, so this stays short of the top band.
Deployment, API & administration
GoodAccess
A central Control Panel, a documented REST API with a Postman collection and tokens carrying scopes, expiry, IP restrictions and activity monitoring, and MSI deployment through MDM with silent-install, no-restart and auto-update switches cover the day-to-day, with priority chat and email support on Premium and 24/7 phone on Enterprise, and setup claimed in ten minutes. We found no public information on a Terraform provider or configuration as code, granular admin roles beyond Admin and Team Owner, a multi-tenant console for service providers, or a self-hosted edition — the platform is described as 100% SaaS-delivered.
Twingate
A GraphQL admin API with full schema introspection, documented throttling limits and three token permission levels, backed by both a Terraform and a Pulumi provider with cloud deployment guides for GCP, AWS and Azure, is precisely the code-first administration I run. The MSP portal manages multiple customer networks per account with consolidated monthly billing, a 14-day proof of concept per network and per-network admin assignment. I found no public information on MDM deployment packages for the clients, granular admin roles, a self-hosted edition, or webhook and ticketing integrations, and support response times appear only as Enterprise add-ons with custom MSA and SLAs.
Architecture, reliability & security assurance
GoodAccess
The support docs publish an architecture overview naming the Team, the dedicated cloud Gateway and its tasks, the Admin and the Cloud/Branch connectors; SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification are claimed, an SLA document is listed, and customers can configure their environment in high-availability. We found no public information on what the vendor's gateways or control plane can see of customer traffic, published audit or pentest reports, a bug bounty, a public status page with incident history, or open-source components, and encryption is described in general terms without a key-management scheme.
Twingate
The published architecture is unusually candid: the controller never touches the data flow, relays are TURN-equivalent and cannot decrypt traffic because session keys exist only between client and connector, and connectors identify themselves to clients only by an anonymized hash. Encryption specifics — certificate pinning, self-signed connector certificates, SHA-256 heartbeats, signed JWT connection tokens — sit on public documentation pages, the controller is described as redundant and clustered, and a SOC 2 report, a responsible disclosure policy and a public status page with scheduled-maintenance notices exist. I found no public information on open-source components, on whether existing connections survive a control-plane outage, or on published incident post-mortems, and the security whitepaper sits behind a lead-capture form.
European sovereignty
GoodAccess
The contracting entity is evidenced — GoodAccess s.r.o., a Czech company with a published company ID — alongside privacy policy, terms, acceptable-use policy and SLA, and SOC 2/ISO 27001 stated. We found no public information on where the control plane, account data, identities and connection logs are stored and processed, on the subprocessors, or on a published data processing agreement, so the chain beyond the legal entity cannot be assessed.
Twingate
The contracting entity is Twingate Inc., a Delaware corporation in Redwood City under California law with exclusive venue in San Mateo County, and the privacy policy states that personal data from the EEA, UK and Switzerland may be transferred and processed outside those regions. A data processing addendum and a subprocessor list are published, a data protection representative (DataRep) is named for the EU, Switzerland and the UK, and a SOC 2 report is available through the trust portal. I found no public information on where the control plane, connection logs or account data are hosted, or on any EU hosting option, which caps this well below the top of the range.
Pricing transparency
GoodAccess
Essential is $7 per user per month (min. 5 users) and Premium is priced per user per month — the captured pages give different figures for Premium, $11 and $14 — with +$49/mo per dedicated gateway, $29/mo per additional Clouds & Branch connector, a free Starter tier, an extra 20% saved with annual billing, and per-plan gating documented for SSO/SCIM, SIEM, device posture and API integration. Enterprise is On Request at a 50-user minimum. We found no public information on VAT treatment or minimum term.
Twingate
The pricing page names tiers with user ceilings — Teams up to 100 users, Business up to 500 — plus credit-card payment, DNS filtering and additional support as add-ons, and the MSP portal consolidates monthly billing per customer network. The captured pages give no price per user for any tier, Enterprise pricing is a custom MSA conversation, the add-ons are unpriced, and the terms only state that amounts are denominated in USD, invoices are due within 30 days, overage users are billed prorated, and fees are non-refundable. A buyer cannot compute an annual cost from what is published here.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
GoodAccess
Twingate
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates both 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 1 of the 6 judges picks GoodAccess and 5 pick Twingate. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is GoodAccess or Twingate European?
GoodAccess is European (EU-Made). Twingate is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do GoodAccess and Twingate have a free plan?
As of 6 Nov 2026, GoodAccess’s own pages state a free plan; Twingate’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.