As I’m prepping my self-hosted setup I wanted to know the community’s thoughts on Netbird, the FOSS and completely self hosted alternative to Tailscale. I often hear Tailscale used as a super easy plug and play way to share your home server contents with other people, so how does Netbird fair in comparison? Is it as easy? Is it a more buggy experience, more complicated, or does it just work? Any pros and cons, or niche edge case situations I should know about? Thanks in advance!
I don’t use Netbird, but at first glance they don’t seem to gave a mobile client yet? This means it’s limited to desktop usage right now. Otherwise, it’s built on Wireguard, which is the same with Tailscale. The only difference being the maturity of each project, Tailscale being the more mature one.
Headscale is the open source Tailscale login server that you can self-host, by the way.
They have an Android client, and the iOS client is slated to drop Q3 of this year.
Hm, I’ll consider Headscale.
When deciding between the two I went with Netbird as it is fully self hostable and entirely opensourcen. Also, kernel wireguard support. There were a couple of bugs with some updates but I spoke with the devs over Matrix and got them all resolved. Works fantastic!
That’s a pretty good sign, I’m hoping I can make it work out. The only con so far is the lack of iOS support as of now and questionable smart/android TV support.
I’ve been using netbird for a while and it’s very stable and easy to configure
Haven’t tried netbird, but I do like Tailscale and headscale. Last time I looked at all these, I landed on Netmaker, which might be worth a look. It’s WireGuard based and has a nice web ui for management.
I’d actually prefer full CLI/TUI for management, but it’s interesting to see how many different alternatives there are. I only knew about Tailscale going into this.
