Open-Source TeamViewer, AnyDesk Alternative

Why people look for a TeamViewer, AnyDesk alternative

For years TeamViewer was the free way to help a relative with their laptop. Then it started flagging "commercial use" on personal sessions and asking for a licence. AnyDesk filled the gap, and then ran into the same commercial-detection behaviour. The tools still work; the trust does not.

Why this one

RustDesk is the standout replacement — a single binary, works through NAT, and you can point it at your own relay server so the connection never touches a third party. Setup is more involved than TeamViewer and worth it, especially if you are the person your family calls.

Before you migrate

Self-hosting means you are the one who gets paged when something breaks at 11pm. Before committing, be honest about three things:

• Where will it run? A €4/month VPS handles most of these comfortably. A NAS or spare mini PC is even cheaper if you already own one.
• Who backs it up? A self-hosted service with no backup is worse than a cloud service, because at least the cloud service had someone else's redundancy. Set up automated backups before you migrate real data into it.
• How will you reach it remotely? Most people start with a WireGuard or Tailscale tunnel rather than exposing ports directly. That is the right instinct.

Migrating your data

Nearly every TeamViewer, AnyDesk competitor listed above ships an import path — CSV, JSON, or a documented export format. The practical move is to migrate one project or one folder first, run both systems side by side for a week, and only then cut over. Export formats are rarely as clean as the marketing suggests, and it is much easier to notice a broken import on a test set than on five years of records.