Yes it's very similar to ngrok or to tailscale funnels or to cloudflare tunnels because it's a SaaS offering that someone (my employer in this case) hosts for free for the world to use... However zrok is also self-hostable and yes you can set it up in daemon mode. Right now setting it up for more than one thing in daemon mode (referred to as zrok front door https://docs.zrok.io/docs/guides/frontdoor/) isn't quite as ergonomic as we would like (doable, just takes a wee bit more effort right now, you can read a post about it on our forum where someone did just that https://openziti.discourse.group/t/zrok-how-do-i-run-multipl...)
It won't timeout if you run it as a service in this way.
"better"? I mean that's up to you. It's quite similar that's for sure, doing largely the same sort of thing but it all depends on how you use it.
zrok is fully open source and fully self-hostable, that's probably the biggest difference? other than that I suppose it depends on your use case and what you like better. zrok has some interesting features with its caddy support, with drives, with zrok front door.
I don't have a full and complete list of similarities and differences but those are a few that come up that might differentiate it. I work on the OpenZiti project (the project zrok is built on/around) so I'm only adjacent to zrok (I use it more than develop it) and I've not done anything other than read the funnels docs for a few minutes :) If you're experienced with funnels thoguh, I'd be interested in what you thought when you tried zrok.
I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure Tailscale Funnel isn't free, you have to be in their premium tier to use it... at least that's what the pricing page implies.
