Enclave Networks

Enclave Networks sells a zero trust network access (ZTNA) product: an overlay network that connects machines, containers and users directly, without a VPN concentrator, without open firewall ports, and without re-architecting the network underneath. It is not a hosting provider, and we list it in our private networking category because it is usually the piece that glues infrastructure together — your Hetzner box talking to an EC2 instance, an MSP reaching fifty customer sites, a developer at home touching a staging server that should never be publicly reachable. The operating company, Enclave Networks Limited, has been registered in Newport, Wales since August 2012, and the product itself launched in May 2020 after an earlier research collaboration with Airbus' Cyber Security Division. That history shows in the design: the pitch is closed-firewall, peer-to-peer, cryptographically verified connectivity, not "another VPN".

What Enclave Networks actually is

You install an agent on each machine you want connected — Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Docker, Kubernetes and Synology NAS are all supported — and enrol it with a key from the web portal. Enrolment gets the agent a signed certificate (Enclave uses its own certificate format, not X.509) with an Ed25519 keypair generated locally on the device. From then on, connectivity is policy: you tag systems, write rules about which tags may talk to which, and the platform introduces only authorised peers to each other. Identity can be bound to your SSO — Microsoft Entra ID, Google, Duo, Okta, JumpCloud or any custom OIDC provider — so access can require, for example, a successful user login from a known IP before a tunnel comes up at all.

The data plane is direct. Peers find each other's public address, punch through NAT with UDP hole punching, and build an encrypted tunnel: Curve25519 ECDHE key agreement per session (so there is forward secrecy), AES256-GCM tunnel encryption where the CPU supports hardware acceleration, all built on libsodium. When the NAT or firewall situation makes a direct path impossible, connections fall back to relay servers that Enclave owns and operates — a detail worth knowing, because a relayed path adds latency and cuts throughput, and your worst-case traffic does traverse Enclave infrastructure. Their documentation is unusually candid about this and explains how to avoid it. Revocation is real: removing a system in the portal permanently revokes its certificate and it must be re-enrolled.

For anything that cannot run an agent — printers, IoT and OT gear, whole subnets — there is an Enclave Gateway you deploy on any Linux system to bridge that segment into the overlay. There is a documented API for automation, and a multi-tenant portal aimed squarely at MSPs managing separate customer networks from one place. The day-to-day workflow is closer to firewall policy than to network engineering: attach a tag to a system, write a rule that lets one tag reach another, optionally add a trust requirement (SSO login, public IP match) and the platform handles discovery, addressing and tunnel setup. DNS can be managed inside the overlay so services resolve by name between peers. The security-event log and network flow metadata give you at least a paper trail of what talked to what, which matters when the selling point is that nothing is implicitly trusted.

Pricing: what you really pay

Enclave prices per enrolled system: $8.00 per enrolled system per month at list, or $7.33 per enrolled system per month when billed annually. An enrolled system is any single machine, device, computer or container with the agent installed and a valid licence key — and that definition matters. A fleet of thirty containers is thirty enrolled systems. There is no per-user tier, no bandwidth metering, and no charge for gateways or the control plane beyond the per-system subscription.

There is a 14-day trial with the full feature set, and after it you can keep using Enclave free for non-commercial use, capped at 5 enrolled systems. Students, universities, startups, open source organisations and charities can get discounts by contacting sales from a group email address. Resellers are supported, and MSPs/VARs are clearly the commercial focus — the whole marketing site is currently framed around managed service providers. Payment is by credit or debit card; it is a SaaS subscription, and if you stop paying, the software stops working. That is stated plainly in their FAQ, which we appreciate more than the usual fog.

Performance & infrastructure

We have no hands-on numbers for Enclave — our own benchmark runs cover VPS and bare metal providers, not overlay networks — so treat this section as architecture analysis rather than test data. On paper the performance story is the right one: direct peer-to-peer tunnels mean throughput is bounded by the two endpoints and the path between them, not by a central gateway. On a direct path you should be close to wire speed minus encryption overhead; on AESNI-equipped hardware the AES256-GCM fast path keeps that overhead small. The failure mode is the relay fallback: symmetric NAT or strict outbound filtering pushes you onto Enclave's relays, and then latency and throughput are whatever the relay path gives you. Enclave publishes a platform status page (status.enclave.io) and maintains ISO 27001 documentation, but there is no published uptime SLA we could find for the control plane. Since the control plane is what introduces peers and issues certificates, its availability matters at enrolment and policy-change time, not for every packet — existing tunnels keep running.

Where it falls short

Start with the pricing unit. Per-enrolled-system billing is honest and predictable, but it scales with machine count, not value. Container-heavy deployments or ephemeral CI runners can get expensive fast, and there is no free tier for commercial use at all — even a single production system is a paid system. Compare that with per-user licensing from the bigger consumer mesh brands and the maths can go either way depending on whether your fleet is machines or people.

Second, the trust model has a centre after all. Traffic is peer-to-peer and the platform cannot decrypt it, but Enclave's Trust Broker and discovery service decide who gets introduced to whom. You are trusting a small Welsh company's control plane with your network's identity fabric. They are transparent about the cryptography (Ed25519, Curve25519, AES-GCM, libsodium — note that despite older write-ups, this is not a WireGuard implementation), but there is no public third-party audit report we could point to.

Third, scale of vendor. This is a small company filing small-company accounts. Support is responsive in our reading of their public footprint, but there is no published support SLA outside enterprise conversations, and the ecosystem — prebuilt integrations, community answers, third-party tooling — is thinner than the Tailscale/ZeroTier crowd. Finally, some use cases just want a dumb encrypted pipe with three lines of config; Enclave's tag-and-policy model is a security feature that becomes ceremony for very small setups. One more practical wrinkle: the product is subscription-licensed SaaS, so an air-gapped or strictly self-hosted deployment is not on the table — if your compliance regime requires the control plane to live inside your own datacenter, this is not your tool.

Who should pick this

Our pick for MSPs and IT teams running multi-customer or multi-site estates: the multi-tenant portal, per-system licensing, subnet gateways for legacy gear and the policy-first model line up with how those teams actually work. It is also a good fit where the security posture matters as much as convenience — closed firewalls, certificate revocation, SSO-gated access and no implicit trust between segments are the defaults here, not add-ons. We would look elsewhere for a homelab-grade mesh (the free tier is non-commercial only), for per-user licensing economics, or for a load-balancing or traffic-management problem — that is a different category, see our load balancers coverage. Hybrid and multi-cloud estates are the sweet spot: a box in one provider, a rack in another, a laptop at home, one flat private network with no site-to-site plumbing.

Key takeaways

• Per-enrolled-system pricing: $8.00 per system per month, or $7.33 billed annually; every machine and every container counts, so machine-dense fleets pay more.
• Real zero trust plumbing: Ed25519 certificates, per-session Curve25519 key exchange with forward secrecy, AES256-GCM tunnels, SSO-bound access policies, hard certificate revocation.
• Direct peer-to-peer tunnels with relay fallback — relayed paths cost latency and throughput, and traverse Enclave-operated servers.
• Free only for non-commercial use (up to 5 systems); 14-day full-feature trial, discounts for education, startups, open source and charities.
• Small UK vendor (Wales, trading since 2012) with good technical documentation but no published uptime SLA or third-party audit we could find.
• Best fit: MSPs, multi-site and multi-cloud estates that want closed firewalls and policy-driven connectivity; overkill for a two-machine homelab.

Sources

• https://enclave.io/pricing/
• https://docs.enclave.io/concepts/identity-and-cryptography/
• https://docs.enclave.io/kb/what-are-relayed-connections/
• https://docs.enclave.io/
• https://enclave.io/company/
• https://enclave.io/enclave-has-launched/
• https://enclave-networks-limited.ltds.uk