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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Netbird vs. Tailscale (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As I'm prepping my self-hosted setup I wanted to know the community's thoughts on Netbird, the FOSS and completely self hosted alternative to Tailscale. I often hear Tailscale used as a super easy plug and play way to share your home server contents with other people, so how does Netbird fair in comparison? Is it as easy? Is it a more buggy experience, more complicated, or does it just work? Any pros and cons, or niche edge case situations I should know about? Thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I posted a comparison a short while ago: https://lemmy.world/post/1452988

I recently decided on headscale as a coordination server with tailscale apps/clients for my setup. My rationale was:

Tailscale seems to be dominating adoption. This isn't a technical consideration but it often correlates with project velocity going forward.
Headscale the self-hosted server is unofficially but decently supported by tailscale the company. They employ the dev and don't seem to be trying to kill the project or mess with it much. It includes most features useful to selfhosted installs, but reserves multi-network setups as the domain of the official tailscale coordination server which strikes me as a pretty reasonable way to segment the market.
Tailscale has great client coverage for Linux, windows, Mac, android, and iOS.
I didn't do a point by point feature comparison, but my sense was that tailscale/headscale meet or beat the featuresets of other projects, so I didn't see any technical reasons to buck against community momentum.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Headscale the self-hosted server is unofficially but decently supported by tailscale the company. They employ the dev and don’t seem to be trying to kill the project or mess with it much.

Probably because they're smart and realise the people who self host probably wouldn't spend money on tailscale, and those who'd buy tailscale subscriptions wouldn't have the time/resources to self host it. Win win.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't use Netbird, but at first glance they don't seem to gave a mobile client yet? This means it's limited to desktop usage right now. Otherwise, it's built on Wireguard, which is the same with Tailscale. The only difference being the maturity of each project, Tailscale being the more mature one.

Headscale is the open source Tailscale login server that you can self-host, by the way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They have an Android client, and the iOS client is slated to drop Q3 of this year.

Hm, I'll consider Headscale.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know anything about Netbird, but I'll link you to my ZeroTier pitch the last time I noticed someone talking about Tailscale: https://lemmy.world/comment/1058287.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This seems like a good middleground, I might use it if my stubborn attempt to use Netbird doesn't work. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When deciding between the two I went with Netbird as it is fully self hostable and entirely opensourcen. Also, kernel wireguard support. There were a couple of bugs with some updates but I spoke with the devs over Matrix and got them all resolved. Works fantastic!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's a pretty good sign, I'm hoping I can make it work out. The only con so far is the lack of iOS support as of now and questionable smart/android TV support.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haven’t tried netbird, but I do like Tailscale and headscale. Last time I looked at all these, I landed on Netmaker, which might be worth a look. It’s WireGuard based and has a nice web ui for management.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'd actually prefer full CLI/TUI for management, but it's interesting to see how many different alternatives there are. I only knew about Tailscale going into this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've been using netbird for a while and it's very stable and easy to configure

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