What is ThinRemote?
ThinRemote is a secure remote access and device management platform for Linux and macOS systems, from embedded IoT nodes to cloud servers.
It replaces VPNs, bastions, and port-forwarding setups with a single lightweight agent that establishes an outbound-only TLS connection to the ThinRemote cloud. From there you can open shells, tunnel services, transfer files, run scripts, and monitor metrics, all without exposing any inbound port.
What you can do with it
- Open a terminal on any device: interactive consoles from the CLI or the browser, plus tunneled SSH for your own client.
- Run commands at fleet scale: exec on one device or fan out across a whole product with concurrency, timeouts and per-device results.
- Reach internal services: TCP, TLS and HTTP tunnels to anything reachable from the device, like web panels, databases, or PLCs on the local network.
- Move files: push, pull and browse remote filesystems.
- Monitor and alert: built-in CPU, memory, disk and network metrics with alarm rules.
- Keep agents current: one-command agent updates with checksums, channels, and staged fleet rollouts.
- Let AI operate the fleet: the CLI ships an MCP server exposing all of the above as typed tools for Claude, Cursor, and custom agents.
What runs locally, what we run for you
The software you install on your own devices is open. The agent (Thin-Remote/thinr-agent), its underlying IOTMP Linux client (thinger-io/IOTMP-Linux), and the command-line tooling with the built-in MCP server (Thin-Remote/thinr-cli) ship with their source, build scripts, and cross-compilation toolchains. Anyone can audit them, rebuild their own binaries, or bake them into custom OS images.
The transport isn't proprietary either. ThinRemote speaks IOTMP (the Internet of Things Message Protocol), an open binary, resource-oriented protocol published as an IETF Internet-Draft (draft-bustamante-iotmp). Its wire format and encoding (PSON) are publicly specified.
What we run as a service is the central platform: the web console, long-term persistence, multi-device orchestration, team access controls, and everything you'd otherwise host, monitor, and scale yourself. In short: the software on your fleet is yours to audit and compile; the platform is the SaaS that spares you from operating the backend.
What you'll find in this section
- How it works: end-to-end architecture
- Architecture and security: trust model and transport
- ThinRemote vs VPN: how we differ from traditional remote access
- ThinRemote vs Tailscale: a network layer vs an operations layer
- Drive your fleet with AI: let AI agents operate your fleet