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 Operations Manager
Runs operations at a fifty-person consultancy where a third of the work is done by freelancers on their own laptops and the rest of the team travels to client sites. Has no IT department, only an external provider billed by the hour. Wants each freelancer to reach one project system and nothing else, access that ends with the contract, a setup a non-specialist can follow, and no call to the helpdesk from a hotel lobby.
GoodAccess
Twingate
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Access model & connectivity
GoodAccess
One-click client apps cover Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and ChromeOS, and remote access from freelancers' own laptops is supported with zero additional hardware. Access runs through a dedicated cloud gateway with its own static IP for whitelisting, offered in 35+ locations, with OpenVPN or IKEv2 on the client and IPsec, IKEv2 or OpenVPN on cloud and branch connectors for site-to-site into AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OVHcloud. Per-application Access Cards, split tunnelling, forced always-on and a persistent connect-at-startup option round this out, though we found no public information on clientless browser access or peer-to-peer connections.
Twingate
Clients exist for every platform my freelancers carry, access is per resource rather than the whole network, peer-to-peer is the default with relays as fallback, and connectors run behind the client firewall in Docker, Kubernetes or the three big clouds with no inbound ports — that is the hotel-lobby resilience I need. I found no public information on always-on auto-connect, named gateway or relay regions, or clientless browser access for contractors beyond an agentless beta terms page.
Identity, access policy & device posture
GoodAccess
Single sign-on works with Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace, JumpCloud and universal SAML, and SCIM provisioning means a departing freelancer's access ends when their account is disabled. Access Cards grant permissions per application on a least-privilege basis, and the device posture check re-evaluates OS version, disk encryption, running and updated antivirus, firewall and registry keys every 5 minutes, promptly disconnecting a device that stops complying. We found no public information on posture checks fed from EDR or MDM tools or on just-in-time approval, though time-based permissions are listed.
Twingate
This is exactly my brief: policies attach to individual resources with group overrides, least-privilege ACLs mean a freelancer reaches only the one project system, and disconnecting the identity provider removes the synced users — access that ends with the contract. Device posture reads from CrowdStrike, Jamf, Intune and similar tools, access requests carry approval, and re-authentication can be forced as often as hourly.
Logs, audit trail & incident response
GoodAccess
The product logs user account ID, source and target IP, connection timestamp and data volume for access to the network and each business system, keeps them 90 days on the paid tiers with a custom period on Enterprise, and states the access logs are available to no one but the customer. Admin logs, threat blocker logs, posture check logs and gateway access logs can stream to a SIEM as JSON over Syslog — UDP, TCP or TCP with TLS — in one-minute intervals, and the dashboard shows active users and devices in real time. We found no public information on retention beyond that, on filtering logs by user or resource, or on tamper-evidence.
Twingate
Connect events land in an audit log with a documented JSON schema covering users, devices and resources, exports go to the admin console or an S3 bucket every few minutes, and there are documented paths to Datadog, syslog and Splunk via Vector. I found no public information on log retention per plan, alerts on unusual access, or a live session view where I could kill a connection.
Deployment, API & administration
GoodAccess
A web Control Panel manages the whole team, deployment is claimed at 10 minutes or one hour with no expert skills needed, and the client installs as an MSI through MDM tools with silent install, no-restart, auto-update and persistent-connection switches preconfigured. There is a documented REST API with scoped, expiring tokens restricted to allowed IP addresses, a Postman collection and activity monitoring, plus priority chat and email support on Premium and 24/7 phone on Enterprise. We found no public information on a Terraform provider, a multi-tenant console for service providers, or granular administrator roles.
Twingate
The whole network is scriptable — a GraphQL API covering resources, policies and devices, Terraform and Pulumi providers, and a multi-tenant MSP portal with a 14-day proof-of-concept period per customer network, which is how my hourly external provider would run it. I found no public information on MDM client rollout, admin role granularity, or support response times per plan.
Architecture, reliability & security assurance
GoodAccess
The documentation lays out the architecture — a Team as the secure perimeter, a cloud-based gateway dedicated to one company, systems defined by protocol, IP and port, and connectors joining private networks over IKEv2 or IPsec — with OpenVPN and IKEv2 named for clients and encryption described for data in transit. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification is stated, a vulnerability disclosure statement exists, an SLA document is published, and the environment can be configured for high availability. We found no public information on published audit reports, a bug bounty, a public status page, or how keys are managed.
Twingate
The architecture is published in unusual detail — customer-hosted client and connector, Twingate-hosted relays and a redundant, clustered controller, plus an encryption walkthrough showing relays cannot decrypt traffic — alongside a SOC 2 report in a trust portal, a responsible disclosure policy and a public status page. The security whitepaper sits behind a form, and I found no public information on open-source components, a bug bounty, or what happens to live connections if the control plane goes down.
European sovereignty
GoodAccess
The contracting entity is firm: GoodAccess s.r.o., a Czech company named in its legal pages, with a privacy policy and terms published. Beyond that, we found no public information on where the control plane, account data and connection logs are stored and processed, who the subprocessors are, or whether a data processing agreement is offered, and no European hosting claim appears on the captured pages.
Twingate
The contracting entity is Twingate Inc. of Redwood City under California law, transfers outside the EEA are acknowledged with general safeguards, and there is a DataRep representative in Cork plus a published data processing addendum and subprocessor list. I found no public information on where the control plane, logs or identities are hosted, so I cannot verify a European chain.
Pricing transparency
GoodAccess
The paid tiers are public with seat minimums — Essential at $7 PER USER / MONTH, Premium at either $11 or $14 PER USER / MONTH as the captured pages give different figures — plus +$49/mo per dedicated gateway, a $29/mo add-on for additional cloud and branch connectors, an extra 20% saved with annual billing, a free Starter tier and a 14-day trial of all premium features with no card required. Plan gating is clear: SSO and SCIM, SIEM integration, the API and device posture check all start at Premium. Enterprise is priced On Request, and we found no public information on VAT treatment or minimum term.
Twingate
The tier structure is public — a free trial, Teams to 100 users with Google SSO, Business to 500 users with identity-provider provisioning, a marked DNS-filtering add-on and consolidated MSP billing with net-30 invoicing — but I found no public information on the per-user price of any tier, so I cannot compute what a fifty-person year costs.
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.