narrowin Diode
Plug-and-play microsegmentation appliance for legacy, medical and OT devices.
- Swiss CompanyThe operating company is headquartered and legally incorporated in Switzerland.
- Swiss DevelopedThe product is primarily developed by a team operating from Switzerland.
- Self-hostableCan be installed on your own servers or on-premises.
narrowin.com
Overview
narrowin Diode is a small network appliance placed between a switch and a device that cannot protect itself, such as medical equipment, research instruments, PLCs and HMIs, legacy Windows machines or building IoT. It runs as a transparent Layer 2 bridge without an IP address, so neither the device nor the switch needs reconfiguring, and filters traffic in both directions by IP, port and protocol based on an allow-list profile.
On first boot a Diode finds its controller and pulls its policy. The narrowin controller, which can run in the cloud or on-premises, manages a fleet of Diodes and is shared with narrowin’s network discovery product Explorer. Allowed and blocked flows are logged locally and centrally and can be forwarded to a syslog target, and certificate-based remote access for vendors can be switched on per device. Diode is not a data diode in the one-way sense.
narrowin is a university spin-off from Liestal that also offers network assessment, design and automation services. Prices are not published.
Why it may be a Swiss alternative
narrowin Diode is operated by narrowin GmbH, which is headquartered in Liestal, Basel-Landschaft. Swiss-headquartered company. Ownership is mixed or not fully verified, or development happens mainly abroad.
We could not verify where customer data is hosted.
May replace
Foreign products with overlapping functionality. An alternative is not necessarily a one-to-one replacement.
Swiss footprint
Five independent questions. A Swiss company is not automatically Swiss-hosted — and vice versa. How the footprint is assessed
Swiss company. Swiss-headquartered company. Ownership is mixed or not fully verified, or development happens mainly abroad.
- HeadquartersIs the operating company headquartered in Switzerland?
- Liestal, Basel-Landschaft (BL), SwitzerlandVerified[1]
- Legal jurisdiction
- OwnershipIs the company ultimately Swiss-owned?
- PartlyVerified[1]
According to the commercial register (March 2026), the two managing directors each hold 131 of 362 capital shares: Tim Senn, a Swiss citizen, and Mischa Diehm, a German national living in Switzerland. The remaining shares are held by Marco Pfatschbacher, a German national in Munich (41), and EnPulse Ventures GmbH of Stuttgart, Germany (59). No acquisition was found in reporting up to October 2026.
- DevelopmentIs the product developed in Switzerland?
- YesVendor claim[2]
narrowin describes its products as Swiss-made network and security tools built by its own team; the company is based in Liestal.
- HostingIs customer data hosted in Switzerland?
- Unknown / not verified
Diode is a hardware appliance installed in the customer's network, and the narrowin controller that manages it can run in the cloud or on-premises. Where the cloud controller is hosted is not stated.
- InfrastructureIs the hosting infrastructure operated by a Swiss-owned provider?
- Unknown / not verified
Features & platforms
- Platforms
- Unknown / not verified
- Deployment
- Made for
- Interface languages
- Unknown / not verified
Privacy & security
- Not verified
- End-to-end encryption, Encryption at rest, Encryption in transit, Multi-factor authentication, Single sign-on (SAML/OIDC), SCIM provisioning, Public API and Data export
- Certifications
- None listed
Pricing
- Pricing model
- On request
- Free plan
- Unknown / not verified
- Free trial
- Unknown / not verified
- Enterprise plan
- Unknown / not verified
- Billing in CHF
- Unknown / not verified
Prices checked 16 Oct 2026. Always confirm on the vendor’s site. Pricing page ↗
Open source
- Open source
- NoInferred
No source code of Diode is published; narrowin publishes other tools (networka, ansible-mikrotik) under Apache-2.0.
Company
University spin-off in Liestal, founded in 2020, that develops network visibility and segmentation products for IT and OT networks and offers network security services.
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Sources & verification
Every claim on this page is marked as verified, vendor claim or inferred. Unknown means we could not confirm it — not that the answer is “no”.
- Verified Confirmed by an independent or official source such as the commercial register.
- Vendor claim Stated by the vendor in its own documentation, website or legal terms.
- Inferred Derived by the editors from indirect evidence — see the note.
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narrowin GmbH
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