NetBird vs. Tailscale

NetBird is a zero-trust mesh VPN offering which, like Tailscale, uses end-to-end encrypted WireGuard® tunnels to protect data moving between nodes. Both use external SSO providers to authenticate, and both provide robust access controls to govern whether and how users, devices, and agents on your virtual network can communicate with each other.

Tailscale and NetBird are also committed to the open-source ecosystem. Both companies support an open-source version of their control plane for self-hosting (Headscale for Tailscale, and NetBird Open Source for NetBird). The client software for both services is open source, and both use the open-source WireGuard® protocol.

Hosting your own control plane is a useful option for those who can’t or don’t want to rely on third-party infrastructure, but it comes with real operational costs and downsides, even for straightforward homelab setups—how do you access your own services remotely, if your self-hosted remote access server is down? That’s why Tailscale hosts all of its own infrastructure, and why NetBird offers its paid NetBird Cloud tier.

Comparison matrix

Feature differences

Many of the differences between Tailscale and NetBird are the natural result of two teams coming up with different answers to the same questions. NetBird’s UI for editing access controls puts a greater emphasis on visualizing the effects of those policies, for example, while Tailscale gives you direct access to the policy file so you can edit it like you would any code or text file. Tailscale focuses on optimizing performance for the userspace version of WireGuard, while NetBird leans on a potentially riskier option to run WireGuard in kernel mode.

One of Tailscale’s biggest functional differentiators is Tailscale PAM. Tailscale PAM provides secure, identity-based access to databases, web apps, Remote Desktop hosts, Kubernetes clusters, and other services on your tailnet, not just devices and servers. It eliminates the need for distributing standing app-specific credentials, and makes it easier for authorized users to access the services they need using the apps they’re already used to. Opt-in support for session recording allows you to see what people and AI agents are doing on your network, not just what they accessed.

Tailscale also benefits from being a more mature product. Tailscale supports using passkeys to authenticate when you don’t want to use a hosted identity provider, and offers libraries that allow integration directly into third-party apps for communicating without a client installed. Tailscale has broader support for EDR and MDM solutions, optional Mullvad exit nodes for increased privacy, and more log streaming integrations.

NetBird can handle SSH connections and Remote Desktop connections through a browser, but it won’t integrate with as many services as Tailscale PAM, and it doesn’t offer any substitute for Tailscale PAM’s robust session recording features.

There are a few places where NetBird offers genuinely useful features. A full Reverse Proxy feature offers flexibility for sharing resources with public networks, though it comes with some configuration complexity. And NetBird’s policy visualizer is a helpful way to actually map out who has access to what.

Open source at Tailscale

Tailscale is deeply committed to open-source software. Tailscale’s core client is fully open-source, as is the code for the DERP relay servers that carry traffic when Tailscale can’t get through a particularly tricky NAT. These were pieces we were especially eager to open-source because they prove that Tailscale doesn’t collect private encryption keys, and that Tailscale can’t decrypt user traffic when it travels across our relays. We have plans to continue open-sourcing even more pieces of Tailscale in the future.

As for the data plane, we don’t have to release the source code—because it’s <code>wireguard-go</code>. Tailscale upstreams its contributions to that project so that the entire community, including NetBird, can benefit from them. Tailscale also supports the WireGuard® project financially, along with Let’s Encrypt (which Tailscale uses for TLS certifications) and several other projects.

Some Tailscale features, like its Synology NAS client or Terraform provider, began life as open-source projects that Tailscale officially adopted. The reverse is true, too; tools like depaware began life as an internal Tailscale tool that was then open-sourced to the community.

Tailscale also offers the open-source Tailcat project, for using Tailscale’s data plane (including NAT traversal and relay servers) without its control plane. These connections can be made using Tailscale’s DERP relay servers, but because DERP is open-source, it’s possible to use your own.

Tailscale relies on the Headscale project to provide an open-source control plane that is compatible with its client software. While Tailscale does employ the project’s head maintainer and supports his efforts to develop Headscale, Headscale remains an independent project with its own contributors, goals, and ecosystem.

That’s the one major difference between Tailscale’s approach and NetBird’s. NetBird offers yearly, paid subscriptions for its open-source control plane that buys users basic tech support and access to higher-tier features (many self-hosted features require one of NetBird’s paid subscriptions, and others are only offered with NetBird Cloud). Tailscale provides no official end-user tech support for Headscale, in favor of focusing more time and resources on supporting and improving the Tailscale-hosted version of the product. We also think it’s better for the health of our ecosystem that Headscale keeps its own maintainers and a distinct community that exists independent of Tailscale.

On self-hosting

NetBird offers official support for a self-hostable version of its control layer. Like Headscale, the Community Edition of NetBird is powered by “community support”—which is to say, when you have problems you can try search engines or forums to find a fix, but you shouldn’t expect support from NetBird or its developers.

We encourage the development of Headscale because we recognize that there are users and environments for which a self-hosted solution makes sense. Sometimes you just don’t want a cloud dependency, for technical or privacy or ideological reasons. The promise of “infinite devices and users for free” is also tempting.

But for the majority of environments, “free” doesn’t mean “free.” A self-hosted control plane becomes another thing to patch and maintain on a regular schedule—and another thing to troubleshoot and fix, if and when it breaks unexpectedly. As your homelab or business scales up, you need to account for redundancy, for maintaining relay servers, for ensuring that users in different geographical locations can still get fast and reliable connectivity, and for debugging any of those things that decide to stop working.

Again, there are scenarios where these trade-offs are acceptable or even desirable. But for most projects, connectivity is just a means to an end, or an obstacle to be overcome. This is why NetBird itself offers NetBird Cloud, and it’s why Tailscale puts its effort into the code and the infrastructure that gets the connectivity obstacles out of the way.