Alma Relay is the relay you run yourself so your phone can reach the Alma on your desktop from anywhere, without port forwarding, a VPN, or a third party sitting in between. Your desktop dials out to the relay and keeps that connection open, and when you open the app on your phone, its requests travel through the relay to the desktop and the answers stream back the same way. Pairing happens with a QR code that carries the relay address, so switching to your own relay takes one fresh scan instead of manual setup on every device. New pairings encrypt the session end to end, so the relay routes encrypted traffic it cannot read, and the routing values it handles are one-way hashes that are never written to disk or logs. When your phone is locked, the relay can pass along the "reply finished" and "Alma has a question" notifications through Apple's or Google's push services, so you hear about finished work without staring at the screen. A live view of the desktop's browser can ride along too, with short-lived credentials issued for the media connection. Sharing the relay with a team works through per-person tokens you can revoke individually, and regenerating your connect code cuts off every paired phone at once. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

With over 7,000 GitHub stars and continuous development since 2017 by former Intel engineer Ylian Saint-Hilaire, MeshCentral has become the go-to self-hosted alternative to ConnectWise Control and Splashtop for managing devices remotely without per-seat licensing fees. The Node.js server installs via a single npm command and manages Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD endpoints through lightweight agents that maintain persistent WebSocket connections for real-time remote desktop, terminal access, and file transfer directly in the browser. Intel AMT integration provides out-of-band hardware management including power control and BIOS access even when the operating system is unresponsive. Device groups organize endpoints by location, customer, or function with granular role-based access control for multi-technician environments. Session recording captures remote desktop interactions for compliance auditing, while Wake-on-LAN powers on machines remotely across subnets. The server supports MongoDB for production deployments handling thousands of agents or the embedded NeDB for smaller setups under 200 devices, with a single 8GB VPS comfortably managing 1,500 concurrent agents. Security features include mandatory TLS with automatic Let's Encrypt certificate provisioning, multi-factor authentication via TOTP and FIDO2, SAML-based single sign-on, IP filtering, and HashiCorp Vault integration for secrets management. The web console provides real-time device monitoring with hardware and software inventory, network topology visualization, and customizable branding. TacticalRMM uses MeshCentral as its remote access layer. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache-2.0 licensed.

Point your RustDesk clients at CortenDesk and the bare open-source server turns into a managed fleet console with a real address book, real access control, and a remote client that lives in the browser. One container runs the ID server, the relay, and the console together, and existing key pairs and device IDs move in unchanged, so migration is a hostname change rather than a rebuild. The fleet view shows live presence, platform, aliases, owners, and last-seen for every machine, organized into folders that double as the unit of access control. People see only their own devices plus the groups granted to them, and the same scoping is enforced in the RustDesk client API, not just the web pages. Policies push client settings over the heartbeat, covering permissions, password rules, and capture behavior, and enforced policies revert local changes automatically. Five audit logs record connections, file transfers, sign-ins, security alarms, and console actions, all filterable and exportable to CSV. When a browser is all you have, the built-in web client views and controls machines with file transfer, clipboard, audio, and multi-monitor switching, no installer required. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. AGPL-3.0 licensed.