(For simpler use cases) it is basically a control plane above wireguard. The simple connections made use the wireguard protocol, all the other functionalities (and boy there’s a lot) are tailscale.
i’m curious about the other functionalities because in almost every homelab discussion about tailscale there’s somebody bringing up wireguard as a viable alternative
You can do most everything Tailscale does with native Wireguard, it’s just a lot of work to manage any of what Tailscale does beyond the most basic. It’s a lot of convenience on top of Wireguard. If you just need a basic “I want my phone to easily get back to my home network” then I would probably stick to Wireguard (and maybe a GUI on top like wg-easy). If you want to do more complicated stuff, like link multiple sites, mesh routing between multiple networks, sophisticated user access controls, etc, Tailscale starts to be maybe be worthwhile. Or another solution, I personally actually prefer to use Netbird, which is basically similar.
One thing it does do that native Wireguard does not is it includes a relay server, so that if two hosts can’t actually reach each other directly they can still negotiate a direct connection or even fall back to using the relay server to communicate. This is useful if you’re stuck behind something like CGNAT or other networking schemes where hosts may not be able to have a publicly routable IP address.
Tailscale (and Netbird) also offer one extra convenience which is they both have built in reverse proxies that integrate with the VPN network they generate. Strictly speaking that part is separate from Wireguard; you can also do that yourself but it’s rather convenient. This lets you have publicly trusted TLS certificates and stuff for your internal sites and depending on how you use it can replace stuff like Cloudflare tunnels. So you can host sites without port forwarding.
FWIW I primarily use a native wireguard server with wg-easy for most of my VPN needs and I only really use Tailscale (actually, Netbird) for some specialized uses. Mostly replacing Cloudflare tunnels with something I fully control.
I see. Some of these are possible through wireguard btw. Subnet routing and exit nodes are pretty easy. Funnel would require some firewall rules, so not wireguard but still easy. For SSH using names, and “magic dns”, you could just modify the hosts file. Taildrop is localsend.
But NAT traversal and automatic re-configuration of clients sound like the main benefits here.
(For simpler use cases) it is basically a control plane above wireguard. The simple connections made use the wireguard protocol, all the other functionalities (and boy there’s a lot) are tailscale.
i’m curious about the other functionalities because in almost every homelab discussion about tailscale there’s somebody bringing up wireguard as a viable alternative
You can do most everything Tailscale does with native Wireguard, it’s just a lot of work to manage any of what Tailscale does beyond the most basic. It’s a lot of convenience on top of Wireguard. If you just need a basic “I want my phone to easily get back to my home network” then I would probably stick to Wireguard (and maybe a GUI on top like wg-easy). If you want to do more complicated stuff, like link multiple sites, mesh routing between multiple networks, sophisticated user access controls, etc, Tailscale starts to be maybe be worthwhile. Or another solution, I personally actually prefer to use Netbird, which is basically similar.
One thing it does do that native Wireguard does not is it includes a relay server, so that if two hosts can’t actually reach each other directly they can still negotiate a direct connection or even fall back to using the relay server to communicate. This is useful if you’re stuck behind something like CGNAT or other networking schemes where hosts may not be able to have a publicly routable IP address.
Tailscale (and Netbird) also offer one extra convenience which is they both have built in reverse proxies that integrate with the VPN network they generate. Strictly speaking that part is separate from Wireguard; you can also do that yourself but it’s rather convenient. This lets you have publicly trusted TLS certificates and stuff for your internal sites and depending on how you use it can replace stuff like Cloudflare tunnels. So you can host sites without port forwarding.
FWIW I primarily use a native wireguard server with wg-easy for most of my VPN needs and I only really use Tailscale (actually, Netbird) for some specialized uses. Mostly replacing Cloudflare tunnels with something I fully control.
Very non exhaustive list (just things I personally use), all of these are configurable (globally or per device/group/tag)
ping homepcin my terminal connects just like thatThey offer so much more though
I see. Some of these are possible through wireguard btw. Subnet routing and exit nodes are pretty easy. Funnel would require some firewall rules, so not wireguard but still easy. For SSH using names, and “magic dns”, you could just modify the hosts file. Taildrop is localsend.
But NAT traversal and automatic re-configuration of clients sound like the main benefits here.
Seeing as tailscale is using wireguard as the underlying protocol I’d imagine most of what they do is possible with wireguard + small extra app :).
Its indeed the zero config mesh with NAT traversal and the fact that all of these just work OOTB that make it great