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Use CasesAll Use Cases

Use Cases

Rabtly fits wherever you need private, secure connections between devices. Here are the most common ways people use it.

Home Lab & Self-Hosting

You self-host services like Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, or Gitea on a home server or Raspberry Pi. You want to access them from anywhere without opening ports.

How Rabtly helps:

  • No port forwarding needed — your router stays locked down
  • Access your services from any device using their Rabtly IP
  • Services are invisible to anyone not on your network

Try it: Remote access to your home tutorial →

Remote Development

You develop on a powerful desktop at home but sometimes need to work from a laptop. Or you have a cloud VM that you want to SSH into without it having a public IP.

How Rabtly helps:

  • SSH to your home desktop or cloud VM from anywhere
  • Your IDE’s remote development features (VS Code Remote, JetBrains Gateway) work over the Rabtly tunnel
  • No more managing SSH keys across multiple access points

Small Team Collaboration

Your team of 3–20 people needs to share internal tools, databases, and APIs without paying for an enterprise VPN or managing complex firewall rules.

How Rabtly helps:

  • Developers connect once and immediately reach all internal resources
  • Add or remove people with a simple invite link
  • Use access control to limit who can reach sensitive services (like databases)

Try it: Set up a team network tutorial →

IoT & Edge Devices

You have Raspberry Pis, IP cameras, sensors, or edge computers that you want to reach remotely without exposing them to the internet.

How Rabtly helps:

  • Install the daemon on any Linux device — even a Raspberry Pi Zero
  • Manage all devices from the dashboard
  • Use MagicDNS so you can reach them by name instead of IP

Multi-Cloud Networking

You have infrastructure spread across AWS, GCP, and Azure (or multiple regions). Services need to talk to each other privately without complex VPC peering or VPN gateways.

How Rabtly helps:

  • All instances join the same Rabtly network and get private IPs
  • Cross-cloud traffic is encrypted and direct — no cloud NAT fees
  • Works behind cloud security groups (no inbound rules needed)

Secure Database Access

Your database shouldn’t be on the public internet. With Rabtly, it never needs a public IP.

How Rabtly helps:

  • Database lives on a private Rabtly IP only
  • Only explicitly allowed nodes can reach it
  • Use access control rules to lock down the port to specific app servers

Site-to-Site (Office Networks)

You have two (or more) offices and want them to communicate as if they were on the same network — without expensive leased lines or complex VPN appliances.

How Rabtly helps:

  • One machine at each site runs the daemon and advertises the local subnet
  • Both office networks automatically see each other
  • Add a third site in minutes

Try it: See the --routes flag in the Remote Access tutorial →

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