Zayo vs Pritunl
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Zayo and Pritunl.
Quick Verdict
3.3/5
Zayo
0 reviews
4.0/5
Pritunl
0 reviews
Pritunl is rated higher (4.0 vs 3.3). More than 240,000 route miles and 34 million fiber miles worldwide across North America, Europe and global reach (2026 figures) Pritunl is a self-hosted VPN solution offering user management, multi-protocol support (OpenVPN, WireGuard), and single sign-on capabilities. Built for teams needing controlled network access without vendor lock-in.
Zayo Fiber network and colocation carrier | Pritunl Open-source VPN server with centralized management and SSO integration | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.3 (0 reviews) | 4.0 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Enterprises, carriers and content operators buying dedicated transport capacity — dark fiber, 100G/400G wavelengths, private networks and colocation cross-connects — across North America and Western Europe | Teams with Linux operations skills that need self-hosted remote access with SSO, audit logs, and full control over where traffic flows. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ✓ | |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | eu datacenterus datacenterprivate networking | free tieropen sourceself hostableteam featuressso |
| Visit Zayo → | Visit Pritunl → | |
Zayo
Pros
- + Tier-1 backbone: 240,000+ route miles, 11+ unique North American long-haul routes and genuine path diversity
- + Specific published SLAs (99.9% unprotected, 99.95% protected; 100% CloudLink guarantee) rather than marketing uptime claims
- + Real network-based DDoS mitigation (50 Tb+ capacity) with 24/7 NOC and SOC operations
- + Deep transport portfolio — dark fiber, 400G/800G wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, colocation — under one contract
Cons
- - No public pricing and no self-serve anything: quote-based, multi-year, engineer-installed
- - Procurement and install timelines are long; not viable for small or urgent deployments
- - APAC presence is subsea reach and partner interconnect, not owned metro fiber
- - Carrier-grade support experience is inconsistent in public enterprise forums; negotiate escalation terms
Pritunl
Pros
- + Free Community tier with a single server and unlimited users — usable without registration or a credit card
- + Per-server pricing with unlimited users keeps licensing flat as teams grow
- + Real identity integration: SSO providers, LDAP/Active Directory/OAuth sources, TOTP and push second factors
- + Security engineering beyond the category norm: SELinux policies, TPM and Apple Secure Enclave device attestation, dynamic firewall
- + Both OpenVPN and WireGuard clients, plus WireGuard/IPsec site-to-site links and multi-cloud VPC peering
- + All source code public on GitHub since 2013 — auditable and customizable via the Python plugin system
Cons
- - SSO, failover clustering, and site-to-site links are gated behind the $70/month Enterprise tier
- - Self-hosting means you own patching, MongoDB operations, certificate rotation, and incident response
- - No vendor SLA or published support response guarantees in the documentation we reviewed
- - MongoDB becomes part of the VPN trust boundary and needs its own hardening
- - Scale claims (thousands of concurrent users) are vendor statements we could not verify independently
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