Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Headscale VS TailScale

Compare Headscale VS TailScale and see what are their differences

Headscale logo Headscale

An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server

TailScale logo TailScale

Private networks made easy Connect all your devices using WireGuard, without the hassle. Tailscale makes it as easy as installing an app and signing in.
  • Headscale Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20
  • TailScale Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-17

Headscale videos

Testing out headscale locally for homelab setup

More videos:

  • Review - Tutorial: Using Tailscale Overlay Network VPN with the Self Hosted Headscale Controller

TailScale videos

The Byte - Tailscale Private networks made easy

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Headscale and TailScale)
VPN
12 12%
88% 88
Cloud VPN
22 22%
78% 78
Security & Privacy
16 16%
84% 84
Localhost Tools
31 31%
69% 69

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Headscale and TailScale

Headscale Reviews

We have no reviews of Headscale yet.
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TailScale Reviews

  1. They make the already great wireguard even better! Installation and configuration is a breeze, can easily connect to machines behind firewall(s) without altering anything.

    Definitely made life easier.


7 Ngrok Alternatives & Competitors for App Tunneling, Free & Paid
Tailscale allows you to create a secure virtual private network between your servers, computers, and cloud instances using the WireGuard protocol from a binary executable.
Source: onboardbase.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, TailScale seems to be a lot more popular than Headscale. While we know about 503 links to TailScale, we've tracked only 42 mentions of Headscale. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Headscale mentions (42)

  • List of ngrok/Cloudflare Tunnel alternatives and other tunneling software and services. Focus on self-hosting.
    Headscale - Open source implementation of Tailscale control server. Can be used with Tailscale's official open source client. Written in Go. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Securely Accessing Private AWS Resources from GitHub Actions with TailScale
    One more thing, you can host Tailscale Control Server yourself if you want, which is a plus. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • A word of caution about Tailscale
    Https://github.com/juanfont/headscale not to mention but Tailscale has a very good culture, I’m sure they would give notice if they pull the rug. There are also many alternatives such as Zerotier and more are showing up every day and open source options. Source: 5 months ago
  • Connecting several hundreds IoT (raspberry pi's) devices with a VPN
    How about self-hosted Tailscale, known as Headscale. Source: 5 months ago
  • Mullvad on Tailscale: Privately browse the web
    You can run your own "head scale" control server and use their clients with it: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale Requires a lot more setup, but it is an option. I've been self-hosting headscale for some time and it is quite stable. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
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TailScale mentions (503)

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Tailscale — Zero config VPN, using the open-source WireGuard protocol. Installs on MacOS, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Android devices. Free plan for personal use with 100 devices and three users. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • 🛡️4 Top Database Security Tools in 2024 🏆🔥
    Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard® protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • I have made a smalll NAS server using samba. What is the port to fwd to get to it externally
    Tailscale is another way of doing it. I'm using it to access my Pi's Samba shares from my phone but it works from Windows as well. Source: 5 months ago
  • Macbook air M1 used with Remote Desktop
    My recommendation would be to use Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/) so you don't expose RDP to the internet. The basic Remote Desktop Client will work but if you want something more complex, Remote Desktop Manager is great https://devolutions.net/remote-desktop-manager/. Source: 5 months ago
  • Enabling Remote Access
    You will need to go to their website Tailscale click the link or just go to tailscale.com. You will need to setup an account and then download the program and login to that once installed. Source: 5 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Headscale and TailScale, you can also consider the following products

NetBird - Connect your devices into a single secure private WireGuard®-based mesh network with SSO/MFA and manage access with just a few clicks.

ZeroTier - Extremely simple P2P Encrypted VPN

Netmaker - Netmaker automates mesh VPN's and software-defined networks using WireGuard.

ngrok - ngrok enables secure introspectable tunnels to localhost webhook development tool and debugging tool.

zrok - Next-generation sharing platform built on top of OpenZiti

OpenVPN - OpenVPN - The Open Source VPN