Software Alternatives & Startups

ShellNewHandler VS Open Postern

Compare ShellNewHandler VS Open Postern and see what are their differences

ShellNewHandler

SourceForge.net: ShellNewHandler details page

Rating
0 reviews
Open Postern

Your cyber insurance renewal will ask if you monitor your vendors. Now you can say yes. OpenPostern watches your SaaS vendors for breaches and CVEs, then generates the PDF evidence your broker needs.

Rating
0 reviews
Pricing
Freemium Free trial $79 / Monthly

Which is more popular?

Based on our record, ShellNewHandler seems to be more popular. It has been mentioned 2 times since March 2021.

social mentions
2 vs 0
Website Monitoring popularity
100% vs 0%

Base details

Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.

ShellNewHandler
Open Postern
Website sourceforge.net openpostern.com
Pricing —
Freemium Free trial $79 / Monthly Official pricing
Listed in

Features and specs

What each product offers, as listed by its team.

ShellNewHandler 0 features
Open Postern 5 features

No features have been listed yet.

  • Secure remote access
    Open Postern appears to provide secure tunneling capabilities, allowing users to expose local services to the internet or connect to private networks without complex VPN setups.
  • Simple setup
    Tools in this category are typically designed for quick configuration, letting developers establish secure connections or tunnels within minutes without extensive networking knowledge.
  • Lightweight architecture
    Such tunneling solutions are often built to be resource-efficient, minimizing overhead on the host machine while maintaining stable connections.
  • Cross-platform support
    Many modern tunneling tools like this are designed to work across multiple operating systems, making it convenient for teams with diverse development environments.
  • Developer-friendly
    These types of tools generally cater to developers who need to quickly share local development servers or test webhooks with external services or team members.

Possible disadvantages

  • Limited public information
    There is relatively little publicly available documentation or reviews about Open Postern, making it difficult for potential users to fully evaluate its features, reliability, and support before adoption.
  • Potential security risks
    As with any tunneling or remote access tool, misconfiguration could expose internal services to unauthorized access if proper authentication and encryption practices aren't strictly followed.
  • Possible vendor lock-in
    Depending on the service model, users might become dependent on the specific infrastructure or protocols of Open Postern, complicating migration to alternative solutions later.
  • Support and community size
    Being a smaller or newer product compared to established alternatives like ngrok, it may have a smaller community, fewer third-party integrations, and slower support response times.
  • Pricing transparency
    Without widely available user feedback, it can be unclear whether the pricing structure offers good value compared to more established competitors in the tunneling and remote access space.

Analysis

An editorial look at what each product does well and who it suits.

ShellNewHandler
Open Postern

Overall verdict

  • ShellNewHandler is a niche, lightweight utility hosted on SourceForge designed to give users more control over the Windows 'New' context menu (the ShellNew menu). It can be considered good for its specific narrow use case, but it is an older, minimally maintained tool that may not suit all users, especially those on modern Windows versions.

Why this product is good

  • Provides direct control over customizing the Windows right-click 'New' menu, allowing users to add or remove file type entries
  • Lightweight and free, without bundled bloatware typical of some other free utilities
  • Simple and focused in scope, making it easy to understand for its specific purpose
  • Open distribution via SourceForge allows transparency and no-cost access

Recommended for

  • Power users who want to declutter or customize the Windows New context menu
  • IT administrators managing standardized desktop environments across multiple machines
  • Users comfortable with older utility-style tools and Windows registry-related tweaks
  • Not recommended for casual users seeking modern, actively supported software with regular updates

Overall verdict

  • Open Postern appears to be a niche VPN/proxy or network tunneling tool, but limited public information, reviews, and independent verification make it difficult to fully endorse without further due diligence on security practices and company transparency.

Why this product is good

  • May offer straightforward tunneling or remote access functionality for specific use cases
  • Could provide a lightweight alternative to more complex VPN solutions
  • Potentially useful for developers or technical users needing simple network traversal tools

Recommended for

  • Users who have already vetted the specific technical requirements it fulfills
  • Technical users comfortable evaluating security and privacy claims independently
  • Those seeking a specific niche networking tool rather than a mainstream consumer VPN service

Category popularity

How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.

Score bands 0–20 21–40 41–50 51–60 61–100
ShellNewHandler
Open Postern
100% 100%
0% 0%
0% 0%
100% 100%
100% 100%
0% 0%
0% 0%
100% 100%

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing ShellNewHandler and Open Postern.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

Open Postern's answer:

Design partner cohort (announcing soon)

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

Open Postern's answer:

The primary audience is MSPs and IT service providers (10–100 employees) managing security and vendor risk on behalf of SMB clients (typically 5–100 employees per client). Secondary audiences include SMB IT administrators handling vendor risk in-house, and vCISOs and fractional security consultants who need a tool that scales across multiple client engagements without per-seat enterprise pricing.

What makes your product unique?

Open Postern's answer:

Open Postern is vendor risk monitoring built natively for MSPs and IT agencies serving SMB clients, with a proper Agencies → Clients → Vendors model and role-based team access from day one. It combines CVE tracking, CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities exposure, SSL/TLS health, DNS posture, and AI-curated breach news into a single 0–100 risk score per vendor — work that otherwise requires three separate tools or a six-figure enterprise platform.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Open Postern's answer:

Most vendor risk platforms — UpGuard, SecurityScorecard, BitSight — are priced for Fortune 500 procurement teams and gate access behind multi-month sales cycles. Open Postern delivers the same core continuous monitoring capabilities at a price point an MSP serving 20 SMB clients can actually afford, with a free tier that's genuinely usable and a sub-5-minute path from signup to a first actionable risk report. No demos required, no procurement process, no 12-month minimums.

What's the story behind your product?

Open Postern's answer:

Open Postern started as a nights-and-weekends project aimed at a gap in the vendor risk monitoring market: small and mid-sized businesses get hit by vendor breaches just as often as enterprises, but the tools designed to protect them, UpGuard, BitSight, and SecurityScorecard, are priced for buyers ten times their size. Once the product had multi-tenant Agencies and Clients working, it was clear that the real operators of vendor risk for SMBs are MSPs, not the SMBs themselves. Open Postern is now positioned as the vendor risk platform built for the MSP channel... one that an MSP can resell to clients as a recurring service line without taking a margin hit.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Open Postern's answer:

Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, React, and Tailwind CSS on the frontend; Node.js with PostgreSQL on the backend; deployed on Vercel. Vendor risk data sources include the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalogue, SSL/TLS scanners, DNS configuration checks, HTTP security header analysis, and AI-powered breach news aggregation.

User comments

Share your experience with using ShellNewHandler and Open Postern. For example, how are they different and which one is better?

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Social recommendations and mentions

Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.

ShellNewHandler 2 mentions
Open Postern 0 mentions
  • I recently got libreoffice, but now the new option in right click looks like a mess. Can someone help me get rid of them please?
    Use Shell New Handler. Run the portable app and simply untick the items you don't want to appear in your new context menu. Source: about 4 years ago
  • This menu should be easy to add/remove programs to... Who is really creating Access Databases from this menu often enough to keep it here? (Not me!) Is there an easy way to edit this?
    I've always used ShellNewHandler for this. It's a really simple portable utility that allows you to remove most of the items from that menu. Tested it out on Windows 11 and it's still compatible. Source: over 5 years ago

Tracking Open Postern since May 2026.