Comparison
Aug 23, 2026
Cloudflare Tunnel is most people's first answer to "how do I reach my machine from outside the LAN." It's free, mature, and not tied to any one use case. If you already run it for other services, you don't need to switch.
It also wasn't built for this. Getting an OpenAI-compatible endpoint in front of Ollama through cloudflared means standing up a tunnel, a hostname, and usually a small reverse proxy in front of Ollama's own API. None of it is hard; all of it is extra steps a purpose-built tool skips.
Here's an honest comparison, not a sales pitch: Cloudflare wins outright on one of these.
| Cloudflare Tunnel | 41tunnels | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup complexity | One command, general-purpose | Install Amallo, done, but it only does this one job |
| End-to-end encryption | Terminated at Cloudflare's edge | Optional, via Amallo's paired connection mode |
| OpenAI-API compatible out of the box | You wire up the reverse proxy yourself | The whole point of Relay |
| Self-hosting the tunnel server | Cloudflare's network only | Relay is open source, run your own |
| Account required | Cloudflare account | None |
If you're already tunnelling other services through Cloudflare, or you want CDN and edge features beyond just Ollama, keep using it. It's battle-tested at a scale 41tunnels doesn't try to match. If the only thing you're exposing is your own models, a purpose-built endpoint is less to wire up:
# same client, no reverse proxy to write
base_url = https://relay.41tunnels.com/v1
api_key = 41t_9f2c…
model = llama3.1:8b
Either way, the model stays on your own hardware; the only question is how much plumbing you want to own to reach it.