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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I first tried zerotier but ran into some weird issue…don’t recall what it is now…and then tried tailscale and was up and running in like 15 mins. But I see others have had the absolutely opposite experience from mine where tailscale wouldn’t work and zerotier would. I think they’re both great products.
I use both, mainly Tailscale because it should be faster because it is Wireguard based, but ZT always on as well as a backup.
I’ve been using Tailscale because I like the business model they’ve been pushing. They’ve also followed through with that, expanding what the free tier of their service offers instead of restricting it more.
Although possibly biased, Tailscale has a write up comparing the two and the conclusion is that both are good at accomplishing their goals. If you have a technology or business preference, it could mostly come down to that. https://tailscale.com/compare/zerotier/
Also a big fan of Tailscale. Works well out of the box and they have great documentation.
I’ll also throw out its nice to see many of their articles comparing services don’t end with a simple “We’re better!” but a “pick whats best for your use case.” Makes them look a lot better imo.
I started with Zerotier. But at the time Zerotier didn’t have exit routes, tailscale did so I tried that and haven’t bothered looking at Zerotier since.
I don’t know if Zerotier introduced that feature but I like that tailscale uses wireguard.
You can use all functions from tailscale in free tier and its simple and quick.
Tailscale comes in my Synology packages and just works. Haven’t looked at zerotier yet.
I’ve just been trying both and the Tailscale web dashboard is a lot more polished. Tailscale also uses wireguard instead of something proprietary. But I’m wondering if the zerotier iphone app might use less battery because I’ve heard tailscale has a problem with that.