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 Skeptic
Has seen "zero trust" on a VPN that still drops every user into the whole office network, "no logs" from a vendor that keeps every connection for a year, and a remote access tool that locked out the whole company when its own control plane went down. Asks who can see the traffic and the metadata, what keeps working when the vendor is offline, whether the audit was published or only announced — and whether the network could be moved to a self-hosted server.
GoodAccess
This judge's pick
Twingate
Criterion by criterion
Access model & connectivity
GoodAccess
Dedicated gateways with static IPs in 35+ locations, clients for six platforms including ChromeOS, split tunnelling, always-on and persistent pre-login connections, and site-to-site cloud and branch connectors over IPsec, IKEv2 or OpenVPN are all documented, and Access Cards assign permissions per application rather than per network. We found no public information on peer-to-peer connections with relays, clientless browser access for contractors, or split DNS, so this stays a gateway-hub model a notch below the top band.
Twingate
Per-resource access through connectors behind the firewall with no inbound ports, peer-to-peer first with relays as backup, DNS resolved locally by the connector, and connector images for Docker, Kubernetes, ECS Fargate and Azure — that is genuine resource-level access, not one tunnel into the office network. What I could not find: named relay or gateway regions, always-on or auto-connect clients, or a clientless path beyond an Agentless Beta by name. Self-hosting stops at the connector; the Relays and Controller stay Twingate's.
Identity, access policy & device posture
GoodAccess
Single sign-on with nine named identity providers, SCIM provisioning, enforced MFA with biometrics, and a device posture check with a long published list of criteria — disk encryption, antivirus, registry key, running process — re-evaluated every few minutes with non-compliant devices disconnected is genuinely documented. Time-based permissions are listed, but posture sources are generic antivirus and registry checks rather than named EDR or MDM tools, and we found no public information on policies as code, approval workflows, or hardware-bound device identity.
Twingate
Authentication is always delegated to the customer's identity provider, disconnecting the provider removes the synced users, re-authentication windows run from one hour to 31 days, native MFA can be required per resource, and posture checks pull from CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Intune and Jamf — a policy model a security team can actually read, with time-limited access requests and approval groups on top. Continuous in-session evaluation and hardware-bound device identity are not described.
Logs, audit trail & incident response
GoodAccess
The log fields are published — user account ID, source and target IP, connection timestamp, data volume — and admin, gateway access, threat blocker and posture logs stream to named SIEM tools over Syslog with TLS in one-minute intervals. Retention is stated as 90 days with a custom option on the top plan and the vendor states the access logs "are not available to anyone except you"; we found no public information on tamper-evident logs or retention of a year or more.
Twingate
Audit logs cover connect, create, edit and delete events with actors of User, API or Twingate Support, a documented JSON schema, manual export from the admin console, sync to S3 every five minutes, and onward streaming to Splunk, Datadog and others via Vector and syslog, with DNS filtering logs included. What I could not find: a stated retention period per plan, a live session view with the ability to end sessions, or alerting beyond connector up/down emails.
Deployment, API & administration
GoodAccess
A central control panel, a documented REST API with scoped, expiring, IP-restricted tokens plus a Postman collection, and MSI deployment through MDM with silent-install flags and automatic updates are all written down, with support channels stated per plan. We found no public information on Terraform or configuration-as-code, a multi-tenant console for service providers, granular admin roles beyond the Admin, or a self-hosted edition — the platform is described as 100% SaaS — and the API requires the Premium plan or higher.
Twingate
A GraphQL admin API with introspection, three token permission levels, IP restrictions per token, Terraform and Pulumi providers, and a real multi-tenant MSP portal with consolidated monthly billing and a 14-day proof-of-concept period per customer network — a provider can run this without touching a GUI. Client rollout through MDM, granular admin roles, stated support response times per plan and any self-hosted edition are not described.
Architecture, reliability & security assurance
GoodAccess
An architecture overview names the components and what the gateway does, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification is stated, high availability is mentioned and an SLA page exists — but these are statements, not published reports. On the questions that decide trust the pages are silent: we found no public information on a public status page with incident history, on what happens to existing connections when the vendor's own control plane is down, on key management, or on a bug bounty; encryption is described in marketing terms, with OpenVPN and IKEv2 named as client protocols.
Twingate
The architecture is published and readable: who hosts what, relays that cannot decrypt, session keys exchanged against the connector's self-signed certificate, and a controller described as redundant and clustered, plus a responsible disclosure policy and a status page with maintenance notices. But the security whitepaper sits behind a lead-capture form, the SOC 2 report is listed in a trust portal rather than published, and nothing says what happens to existing connections when the vendor's own controller goes down — the first question I ask.
European sovereignty
GoodAccess
The contracting entity is proven — GoodAccess s.r.o., a Czech company — and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are stated. But on what actually decides sovereignty the pages are silent: we found no public information on where account data, identities and connection logs are stored and processed, who the subprocessors are, or a published data processing agreement.
Twingate
The contracting entity is Twingate Inc., a Delaware corporation under California law, and the relays and controller are hosted by Twingate in unstated locations; a data processing addendum and a subprocessor list exist, an EU data protection representative is appointed in Ireland, Switzerland and the UK, and transfers outside the EEA are acknowledged. No EU hosting of logs or account data is offered anywhere I read, and Google Analytics runs on the service with an opt-out.
Pricing transparency
GoodAccess
Essential and Premium are priced per user with minimum seats, dedicated gateways at $49/mo, cloud and branch connectors at $29/mo, a 20% saving with annual billing, per-plan log retention, and a free Starter plan — most of a real cost model is public. The captured pages give different figures for the Premium price ($11 and $14 per user per month), the Enterprise tier is "On Request", and we found no public information on VAT treatment or minimum term.
Twingate
Tier names, user ceilings of 100 and 500, a free trial, credit-card payment, USD invoicing at net 30 days and add-ons for DNS filtering and support are public — but we found no public price per user or per plan, and Enterprise is a custom contract with negotiated SLAs. A buyer cannot compute the 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.