If you're interested in self-hosting your orchestration server, you can look into Netbird. It's a very similar tool, but has the server open sourced as well. So you have a self-hosted control server with a nice GUI and all the features the paid version does.
Compared to Headscale, Netbird has so many moving pieces! It looks robust, and powerful, and featureful... yet, self-hosting Headscale is super simple, and less demanding.
I've been slowly moving everything over from Tailscale to Netbird and aside from some shenanigans with Tailscale taking over the entire CGNAT route, it works wonderfully!
Tailscale is still running for now, but I'm getting closer and closer to decommissioning it and switching entirely to Netbird.
Comments
If you're interested in self-hosting your orchestration server, you can look into Netbird. It's a very similar tool, but has the server open sourced as well. So you have a self-hosted control server with a nice GUI and all the features the paid version does.
https://netbird.io/knowledge-hub/tailscale-vs-netbird
Compared to Headscale, Netbird has so many moving pieces! It looks robust, and powerful, and featureful... yet, self-hosting Headscale is super simple, and less demanding.
I've been slowly moving everything over from Tailscale to Netbird and aside from some shenanigans with Tailscale taking over the entire CGNAT route, it works wonderfully!
Tailscale is still running for now, but I'm getting closer and closer to decommissioning it and switching entirely to Netbird.
I'd love to use netbird, but it doesn't yet have capabilities to be embedded in a go binary, like tsnet for tailscale allows.
Here's a gh issue for it.
https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/1103
No IPv6 though. Which is real deal breaker: https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/46
Does it do the fancy NAT-traversal Tailscale does?
Yes: https://www.netbird.io/knowledge-hub/netbird-network-routes