It too is free for personal and commercial use, and has versions for Windows, Unix, and macOS. TightVNC’s closest competitor is TigerVNC.

Ultimately, TightVNC is a free, bare-bones VNC option better suited for the individual home user than a small- or medium-sized business. There’s no support for it at all besides the existing mailing list queries and replies. TightVNC doesn’t have built-in encryption, has no support for audio, requires additional router setup steps in most cases, and doesn’t handle complex image changes well. However, its simplicity is a weakness if you need to do more than the bare minimum. The fact it’s free for personal and commercial use makes it a reasonable consideration for any small- or medium-sized business looking to access a Windows computer remotely.

TightVNC is a lightweight remote access solution that runs quietly in the background until you need it. It’s an extensive compendium of past problems and their solutions, but it’s unwieldy to use and includes a lot of now-irrelevant information. TightVNC has been around since 2001, so there are now over 12,000 emails to search through. (Image credit: GlavSoft)įor free support, you’re pointed to the basic FAQ, installation guide, and mailing list archives to find answers to your queries. TightVNC has a succinct six-page installation and getting started guide for Windows.

This comes at the hefty initial price of $12,000, with subsequent maintenance and support costing $2,400 per year. If you pay for this license, you get one year of email technical support for TightVNC included. GlavSoft doesn’t provide technical support for TightVNC other than to companies licensing the software development kit for incorporation in their own products. You can set a single password shared by all remote users, a view-only password, and a password for the administration console. Though GlavSoft states it plans to add encryption to TightVNC in future releases, competitors like TigerVNC, RealVNC, and UltraVNC have long had this feature built-in.Īccess to the server can be limited by IP address using basic access control rules, but user authentication is rudimentary. Secure use of TightVNC outside of your local area network requires setting up separate SSH tunneling with a program like PuTTY. Upon installation, TightVNC will request you to set a password for remote access.

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