I switched from TeamViewer to RustDesk

I will try to keep this short and sweet, unlike my switching away from Google services post.

Like many, I've been using TeamViewer for well over a decade to remote into my other computers. My typical use case is to remote into a local machine elsewhere else in my home, often a headless server, to.. well.. access it.

I know TeamViewer has had many security breaches and issues in the past, which is why I've attempted to move away from them many times, but there was never another solution out there that worked well for me. All of the other services had poor support, missing features, or just straight up buggy software. I kept returning to TeamViewer as it "just worked" for me. Well, until it didn't.

About 2 months ago I went to access my headless server, booted up TeamViewer, connected fine, until it decided to boot me off? It kept throwing an error telling me there was an issue with my account, but nothing was actually wrong. Then when it booted me off, it would tell me to wait a few minutes, and after waiting and attempting to connect back it would tell me I was doing it too much and would throw a larger timeout at me. Rinse and repeat.

This was the final nail in the coffin. I already hated TeamViewer, it was a huge security risk, and having to leave my local network to connect back to my local network is ridiculous anyway. So I decided to look for alternatives again.

That's when I discovered RustDesk! It's a FREE open source self hosted alternative that actually just works. Works on all operating systems, including web, and the best part is that it doesn't leave my network at all.

I currently run the RustDesk-Server-AIO docker by ich777 on my Unraid server so that I don't have to worry about it being inaccessible, and then run the client software on my devices from RustDesk.com

What if you want to actually REMOTE view?

I know that's what you're probably asking, and I have a simple, better solution for that.

While it's possible to port forward and grant outside access to RustDesk, that opens me up to a similar security issue that TeamViewer had, and since I want to remote into my local machines 95% of the time, it doesn't make sense to expose RustDesk to the internet. So I don't.

Instead, the far superior way to allow remote access to any of your self hosted services is through a VPN. I specifically chose Wireguard, as it's one of the protocols my router supports, and it's pretty damn good (and free!).

Conclusion

TeamViewer sucks. We all know this. RustDesk is a far superior FREE, open source, and secure alternative. It's amazing if you want to keep everything local without any accounts, but also works great if you setup a Wireguard VPN tunnel.