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 IT Lead
Head of a three-person IT team at a 140-person mechanical engineering firm with two plants and a sales office in Vienna. The VPN still runs on the firewall, and every update of it is a weekend. Wants a client that installs through Intune and connects on its own, sign-in with Microsoft Entra so a leaver loses access the same day, the ERP and the file server reachable without opening the whole network, a fixed IP for the supplier portal, and a price per user that survives the next budget round.
GoodAccess
Twingate
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Access model & connectivity
GoodAccess
This covers most of what I need to retire the firewall VPN: client apps for every platform we run including ChromeOS, a dedicated gateway with a static IP I can whitelist at the supplier portal, split tunnelling, forced always-on, and a persistent connection that comes up at system startup before login. Access is granted per application through Access Cards, systems are defined by protocol, address and port, and site-to-site plus Cloud & Branch connectors for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OVHcloud run over IPsec, IKEv2 or OpenVPN across 35-plus gateway locations. It stops short of the top level: we found no public information on clientless browser access for contractors or connectors for Kubernetes.
Twingate
The documentation shows access defined per resource rather than per network: a client for Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome, iOS and Android reaches the ERP or file server through a Connector we run behind our own firewall with no inbound ports, peer-to-peer first with Relays as fallback, and DNS for protected resources resolved locally by the Connector. Connectors deploy as Docker containers, Helm charts, AWS ECS/AMI or Azure Container Instances, with automatic load balancing, failover and a recommended minimum of two per network. We found no public information on dedicated static IPs for the supplier portal, on always-on or auto-connect behaviour, or on named gateway regions, which is what keeps this below the top level for us.
Identity, access policy & device posture
GoodAccess
Single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID including SCIM provisioning is documented, so a leaver loses access the same day, with MFA, passkeys and biometrics on top. Access Cards assign least-privilege per-application permissions to members or groups, and device posture checks cover a long list of criteria from OS version and disk encryption to antivirus, registry keys and running services, re-checked periodically with non-compliant devices disconnected on policy change. We found no public information tying posture to EDR or MDM status such as Intune or CrowdStrike, and no policy-as-code or just-in-time approval workflow beyond time-based permissions.
Twingate
Authentication is delegated to our identity provider with users and groups synced from one or more directories, and when the provider is disconnected all synced users and groups are removed, so a leaver is cut off the same day. Device posture checks name Intune, Jamf, CrowdStrike and SentinelOne with properties such as disk encryption, firewall, antivirus and OS version, and resource-level policies combine authentication, device security and location with MFA, re-authentication windows from 1 hour to 31 days, and access requests handled through approval groups. Least-privilege ACLs are generated per user and security policies are manageable through Terraform, which suits a three-person team perfectly.
Logs, audit trail & incident response
GoodAccess
Access logs record which users and devices reached which systems, with documented fields for user account ID, source and target IP, timestamp and data volume, plus separate admin, threat blocker, device posture and gateway access log types. Streaming to named SIEMs including Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk runs over syslog with TLS in one-minute intervals, and the API can trigger actions such as blocking a user when a threat is detected. Retention is stated at 90 days on both paid tiers with a custom option on Enterprise, and we found no public information on in-product alerting or on keeping logs on our own infrastructure.
Twingate
Audit logs record create, edit, delete and connect events across access, devices, policies and users, exportable as JSON from the admin console or synced to an S3 bucket, with the JSON schema documented and a SIEM guide covering Splunk, Datadog, syslog and Vector fed from Connector journald logs every five minutes. The documentation also states that Relays store no data or network-identifiable information and terminate no data-carrying connections. We found no public information on how long logs are kept per plan, on a live session view with remote disconnect, or on alerts for unusual access.
Deployment, API & administration
GoodAccess
The client ships as an MSI for MDM deployment with silent install, no-restart and per-user update switches plus a persistent flag and a default protocol — exactly what an Intune rollout needs — and there is a central web control panel and a documented REST API with scoped tokens, expiry, IP allowlists and activity monitoring. Support is priority chat and email on Premium and 24/7 phone on Enterprise, with a product changelog in the docs. We found no public information on Terraform or configuration as code, a multi-tenant console for service providers, or a self-hosted edition; the platform is described as 100% SaaS-delivered.
Twingate
The GraphQL admin API covers remote networks, connectors, gateways, resources, groups, users, devices, device posture and security policies, with token permission levels and IP restrictions, and it is backed by a Terraform provider, a Pulumi provider and a Kubernetes operator — the configuration-as-code story a three-person team can actually maintain. A multi-tenant MSP portal manages several customer networks with consolidated monthly billing and a 14-day free proof of concept per network. We found no public information on deploying the client itself through Intune, on centrally managed client updates, or on a self-hosted edition.
Architecture, reliability & security assurance
GoodAccess
The documentation publishes an architecture overview naming the gateway, the team perimeter, the client apps and how connectors attach over IKEv2 or IPsec, and the vendor states SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification with GDPR and HIPAA compliance, which is more than marketing. Encryption in transit is described and the client protocol defaults to OpenVPN or IKEv2, but key management is not described, and an SLA page exists though its terms are not shown. We found no public information on published audit or pentest reports, a bug bounty, the vendor's status page or incident history, or what happens to existing connections when the control plane is unavailable.
Twingate
The architecture is published in unusual detail: Clients and Connectors run on our side, Twingate hosts only the Relays and a clustered, redundant Controller that never touches the data flow, and traffic is end-to-end encrypted with certificate-pinned TLS and session keys that the Relays cannot decrypt. A SOC 2 report is available through the trust portal, a responsible disclosure policy is published, and the status page shows scheduled maintenance with expected impact windows. The security whitepaper sits behind a form-fill, and we found no public information on open-source components, a bug bounty, incident post-mortems, or what happens to live connections if the control plane goes down.
European sovereignty
GoodAccess
The legal pages name GoodAccess s.r.o., a Czech company with a company ID, so the contracting party is in the EU. Beyond that we found no public information on where account data, identities, connection logs and configuration are stored and processed, who the subprocessors are, or a published data processing agreement; the 35-plus worldwide gateway footprint is a network feature and says nothing about where the records live.
Twingate
The contracting entity is Twingate Inc., a Delaware corporation in Redwood City, under California law with San Mateo County venue, and the privacy policy confirms that personal data from the EEA, UK or Switzerland may be transferred and processed outside those regions. What we can verify on the European side is a published Data Processing Addendum, a published subprocessor list, and a data protection representative in Cork for the EU, Switzerland and the UK. We found no public information on where the control plane, user identities or connection logs are actually hosted.
Pricing transparency
GoodAccess
Published tiers give a per-user price with a five-user minimum on both paid plans, a free Starter tier, a 14-day trial without a card, a free tier, and priced add-ons: a dedicated gateway at $49/month and additional Clouds & Branch connectors at $29/month, with annual billing saving 20%. The feature-to-plan mapping is stated, so I can see that SSO and SCIM, SIEM streaming and device posture need Premium. The captured pages give different figures for the Premium per-user price ($11 versus $14 per user per month), the Enterprise tier is On Request from 50 users, and we found no public information on VAT treatment or a minimum term.
Twingate
The pricing page names the tiers — up to 100 users with SSO via Google Workspace, up to 500 users with provisioning and management via an identity provider, and Enterprise with custom MSA and SLAs — plus a free trial and credit-card payment, while custom DNS filtering appears only as an unpriced add-on. We found no public information on a per-user price; the customer agreement states that monetary amounts sit on the order form in USD, with invoices due within 30 days, prorated per-user overage billing, and non-refundable fees. For budgeting a 140-person firm we cannot derive an annual cost from what is published.
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.