About WireGuard

WireGuard® is a modern and fast encrypted networking protocol that offers a number of performance benefits over traditional VPNs and TLS. Among other important features, WireGuard uses Curve25519 for key exchange, which keeps the negotiation phase extremely lightweight and fast. It also has a very low cost per live session, so it can keep direct connections open to a large number of nodes at once. WireGuard’s protocol has been reviewed by cryptographers and the code audited, with only minor issues discovered and fixed.

Tailscale builds on top of WireGuard by adding automatic mesh configuration, single sign-on (SSO), NAT traversal, TCP transport, and centralized Access Control Lists (ACLs).

Tailscale's client software includes the open source WireGuard-Go, which we regularly contribute to.

Wondering how it all fits together? Read How Tailscale Works.

Other WireGuard-based apps

We have had reports of Tailscale not playing well with other WireGuard-based apps such as Mullvad VPN. For more details, read about running Tailscale alongside other VPNs.