Teleport (goteleport.com) gives engineers certificate-based access to servers, Kubernetes and databases. Teleport alternatives matter when the question shifts from who can connect to what each connection is allowed to read, and when AI agents start opening those connections. We build Formal, so read this as one vendor’s view: every Teleport fact links to Teleport’s own pages, as of November 2026.

What should a Teleport alternative cover?

Any privileged access management tool for infrastructure has to answer the same questions. We applied these criteria to both columns of the table above, and they work for any Teleport alternatives on your shortlist:

  • Resources: which protocols it proxies beyond SSH and Kubernetes.
  • Credentials: whether engineers and agents ever hold the upstream secret.
  • Controls inside the session: whether it acts on a single query or response.
  • Audit and just-in-time access: what gets recorded, and how time-bound exceptions are approved.
  • AI agents: how an agent gets an identity tied to the human who started it.
  • Deployment: where it runs and what you operate.

If you’re new to the category, our privileged access management guide covers the concepts.

How is Formal different from Teleport?

Teleport is built around identity and short-lived certificates. Formal is built around a protocol-aware proxy that reads each request and response and enforces policy on it. Both cover SSH, Kubernetes and databases, with the control point in different places.

Where the control point sits

In Teleport, Teleport Agents proxy traffic to your resources and check the roles encoded in each user’s certificate, signed by the Teleport Auth Service (Teleport architecture). In Formal, the Connector is a reverse proxy you run as a container in your VPC. It interprets the protocol, identifies the user, and evaluates policies against requests and responses. The Control Plane is hosted by Formal and cannot interact with your data (architecture docs).

Masking query results, not only granting tables

Teleport documents database access by labels, database users and names, plus table-level permissions for PostgreSQL (Database Access Controls); masking result data is not documented. Formal evaluates policies at session, request and response stages, so a policy can mask, filter or block rows as they come back. This example from our enforcement docs masks the username part of every column labeled as an email address:

package formal.v2

import future.keywords.if

response := {
  "action": "mask",
  "type": "redact.partial",
  "sub_type": "email_mask_username",
  "columns": columns
} if {
  columns := [col |
    col := input.row[_]
    col["data_label"] == "email_address"
  ]
  count(columns) > 0
}

The engineer or agent runs the same SELECT with the same client. The Connector changes what comes back. Our data masking page goes deeper.

Credentials stay on the Connector

A Native User defines how the Connector authenticates upstream: a password, an SSH key (optionally CA-signed), an AWS, GCP or Azure identity, or a kubeconfig. Formal identities never need to know or send these credentials (Native Users docs). Users keep psql, ssh and kubectl.

SSH and Kubernetes sessions

The Connector records every SSH session and every kubectl exec and kubectl attach session, logs every other Kubernetes API request, and runs Kubernetes policies on each one. This one, from the Kubernetes docs, requires MFA for kubectl exec:

package formal.v2

import future.keywords.if

session := { "action": "mfa" } if {
  input.kubernetes.subresource == "exec"
}

Setup details live on our SSH and Kubernetes pages.

AI agents and the human behind them

Teleport offers MCP server proxying with per-tool audit events in every edition, and per-agent certificates in its Enterprise editions (feature matrix). Its Secure MCP page describes RBAC and ABAC on every LLM-to-database query, with query-level audit logs. Its Agentic Identity Framework is a set of reference designs and SDKs; Teleport states it is “not a licensed product or feature”.

Formal treats an agent like any other identity at the proxy. The Endpoint exchanges OIDC tokens from AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub Actions or SPIFFE for short-lived Formal credentials (OIDC docs). On an OIDC machine session, policies see both the machine user and the human it runs for (end_user). The MCP gateway on the Connector signs MCP clients in, adds the upstream credential and logs every tool call.

Where does Teleport fit well?

Teleport positions its PAM offering as “Vault-free Privileged Access” with just-in-time access (Teleport homepage). Teleport PAM is a reasonable choice when:

  • Your estate includes Windows desktops and GitHub. Both are listed as Teleport Protected Resources.
  • You want certificate-based machine identity. Machine & Workload Identity issues short-lived certificates and supports SPIFFE.
  • You need moderated sessions. A moderator can observe, join and terminate a session in real time (Teleport features).

All of the above is from the Teleport feature matrix unless linked otherwise.

Why do teams pick Formal as a Teleport alternative?

Teams pick Formal when access control has to reach inside the session: masking a column in a Postgres response, blocking a DELETE in production, requiring MFA for kubectl exec, or limiting what a cloud agent can query. Policies are Rego, shipped with Terraform, Pulumi or the Kubernetes operator, and the same policy engine covers engineers, machine users and AI agents.

Cursor replaced its homegrown access proxies with Formal Connector, which now governs how its engineers and AI agents reach SSH, PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse and Kubernetes (Cursor case study). Notion uses Formal for database access governance across its RDS fleet:

“We did a vendor bakeoff between a number of products and Formal came out on top.”

— Daniel Pyykonen, Head of Security Engineering @ Notion

How do Teleport, StrongDM and Formal compare?

If you’re weighing StrongDM vs Teleport, note that StrongDM is now part of Delinea, which completed the acquisition on March 5, 2026. Here is how each vendor describes itself, as of November 2026:

TeleportStrongDMFormal
Approach, in the vendor’s wordsA “unified identity layer” for humans, machines and AI, with short-lived certificates“just-in-time runtime authorization”, now part of the Delinea PlatformA reverse proxy (Connector) in your VPC, plus the Endpoint on laptops and agent hosts
Resources namedServers, Kubernetes, databases, web apps, desktops, clouds, GitHub, MCP servers“cloud infrastructure, production databases, containers, and CI/CD pipelines”Databases and warehouses, SSH and AWS SSM, RDP, Kubernetes, HTTP and gRPC APIs, MCP servers, LLM APIs
Inside the sessionRole and label checks; PostgreSQL table permissions“authorize or block every privileged operation”Block, rewrite, mask, filter per query and response

Sources: Teleport homepage, Teleport Protected Resources, Database Access Controls, delinea.com/strongdm, Delinea’s press release (StrongDM boilerplate). Our StrongDM alternative page covers StrongDM in more detail.

How is Teleport priced?

Teleport pricing is usage-based on two billable metrics, per its pricing guide (revision June 16, 2026):

  • Monthly Active Users (MAU): any unique interactive user who shows activity at least once in a monthly period.
  • Teleport Protected Resources (TPR): any unique resource (Kubernetes cluster, SSH server, database instance, desktop, MCP server, Git repository, or machine and workload identity) registered with the cluster in a monthly period, averaged hourly.

The Standard bundle includes Zero Trust Access, Machine & Workload Identity and Identity Governance. Premium adds Identity Security. Teleport’s pricing page shows a “Get Pricing” form rather than list prices.

To scope Formal for your resources and team, get a demo.