SSH tunnels are a real solution. They've been working reliably for decades. If you're already using them and they're serving you well, this post isn't an argument to stop.
What SSH tunnels don't give you — and where SessionForge fills that gap — is worth understanding clearly, without the marketing spin. This is an honest comparison.
A local port forward tunnels traffic from a port on your local machine through an SSH connection to a destination port on or beyond the remote machine:
ssh -L 8080:localhost:3000 user@remote-hostNow localhost:8080 on your machine is connected to port 3000 on the remote. Everything over that connection is encrypted in transit by SSH. The remote machine needs to be reachable via SSH — either directly (public IP or DNS, port 22 open) or through a jump host.
For a terminal session to a remote machine, you're typically not using a port forward — you're just SSH-ing directly and running your session in the remote shell, possibly inside screen or tmux so it persists if your connection drops.
This works. The question is what it costs you to maintain it.
When SSH tunnels are running well, you don't notice the overhead. When something goes wrong, you notice it all at once. The list of things that need to stay correctly configured:
Firewall and network access. Port 22 (or your SSH port) needs to be open from where you're connecting from. Corporate networks, hotel wifi, and some mobile carriers block port 22. You can move SSH to another port (443 is common for bypass purposes), but now you're maintaining non-standard configuration. If you're connecting to a cloud VM, security group rules need to be right.
Key management. SSH key pairs are per-machine, per-user. If you add a new laptop, you add a new public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on every remote machine you need to reach. When a team member leaves, you remove their keys. When keys rotate, you update them. At small scale this is fine. At moderate scale it becomes a maintenance task that someone sometimes forgets.
Session persistence. Raw SSH sessions die when the connection drops. screen and tmux solve this — the session keeps running on the remote machine and you can reattach. But now you have an additional tool to manage, session naming conventions to maintain, and a reattach command to remember (screen -r, tmux attach, or a session name if you named it).
No web access, no mobile access. SSH requires an SSH client. This is fine on a laptop. It's workable on a phone with an app like Termius or Blink. It's not accessible from a browser on a shared machine, a tablet, or anything that doesn't have an SSH client installed and your key available.
No visibility without connecting. To know what's running on a remote machine, you have to SSH into it and look. There's no out-of-band view of session status, what's running, or what happened while you were gone — unless you build it yourself.
SessionForge is not a tunnel. It's a session management layer built on top of an agent that connects outbound to a relay.
The practical differences:
No inbound firewall rules required. The agent on your machine connects outbound to SessionForge's relay. Your machine never needs to accept inbound connections. If it can reach the internet, the agent works — regardless of what your firewall or NAT does to inbound traffic. This matters a lot for machines that aren't publicly reachable by default.
Sessions are persistent objects, not connection-dependent. A session in SessionForge exists independently of whether you're connected to it. Start a session, close your browser, come back tomorrow — the session is exactly where it was. Output accumulated while you were gone is in the history. Reconnecting takes you to the live state of the session, not a fresh shell.
Named, discoverable sessions. Sessions have names you assign. You can see all sessions across all machines in one place — active, stopped, what command is running, how long it's been running. You don't need to SSH into a machine and run screen -ls to know what's happening.
Web terminal from any device. xterm.js in the browser, connected via WebSocket. No SSH client required. Works from a phone, a tablet, a machine you don't own. The terminal is full-featured — color codes, resize, keyboard shortcuts.
API and webhooks. Create sessions programmatically. Get notified when sessions stop. Integrate session events into your existing tooling. This is where SSH tunnels have no equivalent — there's no SSH API, no webhook for "session crashed."
Team access without key management. On Team plan, multiple users can access machines through the same RBAC model. No distributing SSH keys to each new team member, no removing them when they leave. Access is controlled at the account level.
There are real cases where SSH tunnels — or direct SSH, or SSH + tmux — are the better choice:
You need raw protocol proxying. Database tunnels, forwarding a specific port, connecting a local client to a remote service — SSH port forwarding is the right tool. SessionForge doesn't do protocol-level proxying.
You're in a locked-down environment with no outbound internet. The SessionForge agent needs to connect to SessionForge's relay. If the host machine has no outbound internet access (air-gapped environments, certain secure facilities), the agent can't function. SSH within the local network still works.
You already have everything working and the overhead is acceptable. If your key management is under control, your machines are accessible, your tmux setup is solid, and you don't need web access or team sharing — SSH is fine. Don't introduce new tooling for solved problems.
You're doing one-off access, not ongoing work. For occasional administrative access to a machine you rarely touch, SSH is lower friction than setting up an agent. SessionForge is worth the setup when you're doing regular work on a machine.
SSH tunnels solve the connectivity problem. SessionForge solves the session management problem. These are different problems, and for many workflows you need both addressed — but they're not the same tool competing for the same job.
If what you need is: persistent sessions, web terminal access, team sharing, API automation, and session history — that's what SessionForge is built for. If what you need is: raw port forwarding or secure protocol tunneling — SSH is the right tool and SessionForge doesn't replace it.
Most developers who switch to SessionForge for session management don't stop using SSH. They stop using SSH for session management specifically, and keep using it for everything else it does well.