Guacamole
Clientless remote desktop gateway supporting standard protocols like VNC and RDP.
Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.
Commit activity more than 45% of tracked projects; popularity more than 62%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 4k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | — |
| Repo updated | 14 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 |
| Built with | Java, C |
Is Guacamole actively maintained?
Guacamole is under active development: 222 commits landed over the last 11 months, averaging roughly 20 commits a month in the most recent quarter.
No tagged releases are published, so there is no stable version to pin to — you would deploy from the default branch or a container image built from it.
Guacamole ranks #9 of 15 in Remote Access, placing it mid-table for maintenance activity.
What Guacamole actually does
Guacamole is a server-side remote desktop gateway that renders desktop sessions directly within a web browser. It acts as an intermediary, translating standard remote access protocols such as VNC and RDP into HTML5-based web traffic without requiring any client-side plugins.
Best fit: It suits administrators who need to provide browser-based access to remote machines across an organisation without installing client software on every local device.
Worth knowing: The codebase has a moderate maintenance profile and relies on a mix of Java and C components, which might complicate troubleshooting or custom modifications.
Deployment notes
You will typically need to run a servlet container for the Java web application alongside the native C daemon, and place the setup behind a reverse proxy to handle TLS termination securely.
Links
Guacamole as a replacement for
Alternatives to Guacamole
Projects in the same categories, ordered by health score.
Secure remote access gateway that supports the WireGuard protocol. It offers a Web GUI, 1-line install script, multi-factor auth (MFA), and SSO.
Web-based operating system designed to be feature-rich, exceptionally fast, and highly extensible.
Identity-aware tunneled reverse proxy with dashboard UI, access control, and WireGuard-based tunnels (alternative to Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale).
Fully transparent SSH, HTTPS, Kubernetes, MySQL and Postgres bastion/PAM that doesn't need additional client-side software.
Run your own web server to remotely manage and control computers on a local network or anywhere on the internet.
Modern SSH server for remotely accessing linux devices via command line (using any SSH client) or web-based user interface (alternative to sshd).