Tailscale Reviews

Honestly, my main use case for Tailscale is my home lab and being able to access my home network devices using a Zero Trust platform that's fully secure. It has been so useful, especially for sharing some of my self-hosted services with family and friends.

For example, I use Tailscale in my home lab by having it installed on all of my devices, like my personal laptop and PC, as well as on my servers. On my servers themselves, let's say I'm hosting a web page on port 3000. I could just use my Tailscale MagicDNS name and then the port, or I could just use the Tailscale IP and the port to access those web pages. So for example, I host things like VIQUINIA and some other things I can easily access. Another use case that I have for Tailscale in my home lab is I have it installed on my firewall, which is built with OPNsense. What I do is I have it set as an exit node and I also broadcast my entire subnet. So that way, it's as if I'm connecting to a regular VPN and have access to my full home network, not just the devices that have Tailscale installed on them. I can also funnel my traffic through my home network if I'm elsewhere. Since I have my own custom DNS set up, if I am using my network as an exit node, I get free ad-blocking wherever I go.

For my organization, we use Tailscale for our database as a secure way to access our VPC. It's really great. It's an easy way for everyone to connect and disconnect. Nothing clunky, nothing being left behind, very lightweight, very nice UI, and very useful. For my home lab, it has been great because there are services you want to host, but you don't want to expose them to the public network, and using Tailscale gives you a very nice way of actually accessing that without having to deal with exposing things to public ports. I also really appreciate Tailscale services, which I forgot to mention, which involves hosting a service on Tailscale itself.

Regarding metrics, I guess a lot of times it saves hours. Sometimes I forget something at home and if I use Tailscale, I can easily access my network and grab it, whereas usually I would have to drive back home. I feel that in itself is really huge.

The best features Tailscale offers are their free tier, which is amazing. Whatever it provides, I feel it's a very good amount for what it gives you. I would honestly even be open to paying if my needs expand from what I am currently using. I feel the Zero Trust networking thing is really great. I feel the ability to also integrate Mullvad VPN into your own Tailscale network and use that as an exit node is huge. It makes a very nice, seamless experience for VPN. Rather than having multiple clients, you just use Tailscale and that handles everything for you. I also appreciate the Tailscale drop feature. I feel that's very unique, kind of a global AirDrop with anything that has Tailscale. So it's a really simplified way of sharing files, not only over your local network, but over your Tailscale network, your virtual cloud.

A unique thing that I did, which at the time was an experimental feature, but now I believe it's fully out and available, is using Tailscale files. Essentially, I had a bunch of space on my server and I made a Tailscale share. So now if I ever go on any of my devices, I have a whole file section which I can actually just drag and drop to that location and it's kind of a shared Google Drive. Any of the old storage I had lying around, I was able to convert it into my own free cloud storage.

I would say I rely on just the regular Tailscale Zero Trust network the most in my daily workflow. I feel I have that on all the time and I'm accessing things when I'm not at home. Usually, when I'm traveling, it's when it's the most useful, but if I'm staying at home and working from home, it's not as useful because I'm connected to my same network. But for example, if I'm at my in-laws' house or if I'm outside at a library or coffee shop, it's very useful to have.

I feel the speed of the control servers are a bit too slow. I feel that's the main bottleneck right now for Tailscale. For example, at my apartment, I can do 2-gig networking, but when I connect via the exit node, and I'm wired in somewhere else, and that place also has 2-gig networking, I'm at max getting half of my speed. The main bottleneck here is really the control servers and the throughput of data.

I feel Linux needs its own UI client. I had to use a custom third-party one. That is a big thing as well.

To make it a 10, I mean, have better support for Linux. That's probably the main thing, honestly. Fix the DNS things too. There's some issues where I should be able to use my own custom DNS easily and then when you move MagicDNS starts causing problems, I should be able to just have my own custom DNS that links directly into Tailscale and assign each thing its own specific hostname. I feel that doesn't work as well as expected, or maybe you do provide that, but then it's kind of obfuscated through weird documentation.

I have been using Tailscale for about two years or a year and a half.

Tailscale is stable.

Tailscale's scalability is good.

It has been a really great product. Ever since I started using it, I got my family members to get on it and so many other people, and I very openly recommend it.

I looked at Netbird or something before choosing Tailscale.

I advise others looking into using Tailscale to start faster or look at the documentation.

Our main use case for Tailscale is to provide a VPN service where we can remotely log in or SSH into other devices on our network on Tailscale. We're using Headscale. We use it to perform updates, send information, ping certain cameras, and connect devices.

The company did use ZeroTier before, but we chose Tailscale for this use case because it has definitely been the better option of the two, providing faster service and easier installation.

I believe I have covered everything about our main use case. Tailscale is a very solid framework and is very useful for smaller companies if they want to start out or even bigger companies who want to have a robust network of devices that they want to manage.

The best features Tailscale offers are the web interface that allows you to see all of the networks, all the IPs that are active and whether they're offline or online. It is very useful when you have a lot of customers and different devices in different areas. The network connectivity feature is the best.

The web interface and network connectivity features help me in my day-to-day work because we can SSH into the device without knowing the public IP or having any other remote RDP services on that device. If we have the Tailscale IP, we're able to get into that device just as if it were on our LAN or as if it was wired. We use this capability day-to-day for devices all across the U.S.

Tailscale has positively impacted our organization by creating a streamlined appearance, and it is definitely apparent that it is one of the backbones of the company. Currently, if Tailscale goes down, our services are not operable. This has happened in the past but has been fixed multiple times. The newest version has fewer bugs than before.

I don't have specific metrics, but I definitely feel it is a lot faster going through the tickets using Tailscale and being able to troubleshoot on the network of the devices.

Tailscale could be improved by having a better way to troubleshoot. Sometimes our devices do go offline, but if we are able to have some sort of command where we can instantly turn off and turn back on the services at the IP, that would be great.

I believe that covers the needed improvements; it is already a pretty smooth experience.

I have been using Tailscale since I started my career, which was three years ago.

Tailscale is stable in my experience.

Tailscale is definitely very scalable. We haven't had any problems with our scalability, as we have over 300 to 400 devices that use Tailscale that we connect with and utilize on a daily basis.

I have not personally reached out to customer support, but I believe my manager may have when it went down one time.

We did use ZeroTier before; that was before I was employed, but some of our devices still have it installed. They marked up the price significantly, so we did not continue with them.

We deploy Tailscale on a private cloud using Headscale, and we use DigitalOcean to host the Headscale server so that we can use Tailscale on all the devices and connect them. We install Tailscale on the device and log in.

I haven't seen a return on investment with Tailscale based on metrics because we are not big enough to have the metrics or have time for the metrics, but on a personal note, it seems faster and is very streamlined.

I would tell others looking into using Tailscale to get it and use it. If they need an enterprise-level network, it is definitely one of the best solutions.

I was not involved in decision-making before choosing Tailscale; I am just utilizing the software, so I did not come up with the solution of Tailscale.

I rated this review a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for Tailscale is remote access to devices across networks.

In my church context, I can give you a quick specific example of how I use Tailscale for remote access: we have a Reolink doorbell that I access over the local network via the Reolink client apps or MPV, and it also has a cloud solution that is slow and unreliable. I use Tailscale to remotely connect to the doorbell and its NVR, and it is quick, nice, smooth, and great. Another example is in my homelab, where I have many devices in a rack, and I use Tailscale to connect to any of them for fast, reliable access since they can all be in one Tailnet. In the church context, I can use subnet routing to fully expose the entire subnet that the doorbell is on and access various other server computers remotely.

In the church context, I have a number of server computers running virtual machines on a Proxmox device, and I generally SSH into the Proxmox host or the virtual machines through Tailscale when I am outside of the church network. Tailscale gives me a list of all devices on the Tailnet, making it easy to copy the IP addresses and access everything flawlessly.

I would say the best features Tailscale offers are ease of use and ease of remote access. Compared to Tailscale's competitors that I have tried, such as ZeroTier, Tailscale allows you to access a device from another place in significantly less time. Tailscale is very fast, and WireGuard as a protocol is a great choice for a VPN solution because it is so quick, making things such as game streaming over Tailscale easy and fast.

Tailscale's security is fabulous, especially the access control features and the ability to use existing OAuth accounts for access. The user interface is very sleek and not cluttered, which I appreciate when I am on a device with a graphical interface or a command line interface. There are a couple of quirks with the command line interface that I believe are intentional design choices for the best.

Tailscale has positively impacted my organization by making the previously unusable doorbell with the cloud solution fast and reliable for remote access. Previously, conversations through it would be stuttery and hard to understand, with periods of no video feed. Tailscale fully fixed that issue. Accessing servers is easier, allowing me to SSH into the hypervisor or virtual machine seamlessly whenever I need to improve a feature or fix downtime issues. Tailscale managing the security for these critical functions is a beneficial aspect.

I do believe there are a couple of features and changes I would like to see with Tailscale. I initially got introduced to Tailscale in high school when I needed access to services running on my server, but due to deep packet inspection being in place, I could not use Tailscale. Tailscale's free plan effectively introduces people to the service, but I would love to see an anti-censorship VPN protocol implemented. When accessing my homelab, I usually have to resort to using VLESS host through 3X-UI, which is complicated. I would like Tailscale to provide more censorship-resistant options, such as Shadowsocks or VLESS, as fallback protocols.

I would like more anti-censorship protocols, such as VLESS or Shadowsocks, so I can effectively use Tailscale in environments with censored internet access that block WireGuard through deep packet inspection.

More anti-censorship VPN protocols are the main improvement I wish for. If Tailscale implemented these, I would use it for all my VPN needs and would likely use Tailscale entirely.

I have been using Tailscale for five years.

The user interface, documentation, and support for Tailscale are fabulous, and I have no complaints about the user interface. I might prefer a TUI instead of a CLI because I am often not using graphical applications, but the CLI is satisfactory. Overall, the interfaces are great, and the documentation is straightforward for setting up Tailscale on server devices. I only need to reference documentation for specific features such as enabling subnet routing.

My advice to others looking into using Tailscale is to do it; it makes remote access much easier.

For Tailscale, we use it in testing in terms of mobile deployment, and it is a great way to connect a mobile device or any device to a network to allow us to get onto our testing networks and see the UI and other things in that regard on different devices very easily.

Tailscale is very intuitive as well as accessible, which allowed us to connect everything to our testing network very seamlessly since it could easily be downloaded onto mobile devices or other devices.

That covers our main use case and what Tailscale does a great job at helping with our testing and device connectivity.

For the platform that we used Tailscale for, we really just set up accounts and were given access through being invited to a Tailscale team, from which we could just set up connectivity on the device.

The best features Tailscale offers in my experience would be accessibility from any device; it is on iOS, it is on Android, and it helps us test multiple environments very well, especially for UI testing to ensure all of our UIs are reactive on all devices correctly across our entire infrastructure and device network.

The ease of connectivity in terms of Tailscale's ability to allow downloading the application on any device, whether it be a laptop or mobile, stands out as the most valuable for our workflow, because it allows them to communicate very seamlessly and easily with minimal setup, which was its biggest appeal to our team in developing our platform.

In terms of testing, Tailscale was the best way for us to establish connections across multiple devices and allowed us to test our UI and application across different platforms, iOS, Android, seamlessly, which made our website more reactive and essentially drove our testing.

I would not say anything in Tailscale's use case could be improved; what it does and its intended use is perfect, but the application on the laptop is a little buggy since it continuously opens in the background when it should not be.

I have been using Tailscale for about two years.

Tailscale has been stable in my experience as I have never had problems with connectivity or any bugs in its usage.

I cannot comment too much on scalability since our team always remains very small in developing our platform, but for the team members that we have added to it, there have been no problems, so it has handled everything very well.

I have never needed customer support for Tailscale.

We did not use a previous solution; Tailscale was the first thing that came up when we needed to solve our issue of getting onto multiple devices very easily.

I did not handle any pricing, setup costs, or licensing for Tailscale, but from what I know, it was very affordable at only five dollars per month for a team of Tailscale users, which is really easy for small startups.

We went straight for Tailscale without evaluating other options, as it was just perfect for our use case and needs.

I have seen time saved as a significant return on investment since it was a big help over dealing with emulators, as Tailscale allowed our application to run directly on our device and see our reactiveness.

I did not handle any pricing, setup costs, or licensing for Tailscale, but from what I know, it was very affordable at only five dollars per month for a team of Tailscale users, which is really easy for small startups.

We went straight for Tailscale without evaluating other options, as it was just perfect for our use case and needs.

If you are looking for a one-stop shop application that handles device connectivity across platforms, whether it be PC, Android, or iOS, Tailscale is a great solution for connecting devices together to get onto the same network for easily testing your applications on actual hardware rather than emulated hardware. I give this product a rating of nine out of ten.

I have been using Tailscale for three to four years now for personal use and for my volunteer and business work.

My main use case for Tailscale is maintaining my personal network that I use for family and friends. It is easy to set up on pretty much any device.

I use it for getting around port forwarding restrictions. For example, if I have a network on my school computer that I cannot port forward from, I can plug a VPN into it and port forward onto the VPN.

Tailscale has been beneficial for hosting game servers with friends online. It is useful for situations where you need to get around firewalls and restrictions. You need a VPN to secure your networking because many of these game servers do not have encryption by default when they are small games. It is helpful to be able to set that up.

The best features Tailscale offers include ease of startup. Once you log in on your Google account, you can add other people's Google accounts or use emails if they do not have one. There are all sorts of options available. I used it a while ago to set up, so I am not sure how the current setup options are, but it is very useful in that aspect.

Tailscale has been very helpful for setting up a VPN network in various locations when you might not have the time to set up port forwarding or configure servers on each end. When you just want something quick and ready to go, it is the solution for you. It is really good for that.

This quick setup with Tailscale has saved me probably days of work that I would have spent learning how to configure traditional VPN solutions, more traditional solutions like WireGuard, where I would have had to learn their entire configuration process and it would have taken days just to set that up. After that, I would have had to replicate it on every machine I use.

I think Tailscale can be improved by enhancing the free side of things. It is really useful for people who are students or personal users who are not business users to keep going with the free version because it expands your user base. If you can get people to realize that this is actually a good product, they will be willing to pay for the paid version.

The process of adding other users with their Google accounts or emails was challenging at first when I was figuring out how to add other emails. I thought I would have to sign in on my Google account each time, but once I discovered that you could invite people, that was when it really took off.

My advice for others looking into using Tailscale is to make sure it has the features you need for the payment plan you are willing to go for. There are multiple payment plans, and if you want more users or more devices, you have to pay more, but make sure it has what you need for the payment you are willing to offer.

My main use case for Tailscale is access to internal resources and supporting clients, having replaced two different VPN products I was using previously.

I have a number of applications that are running within my network. I have used the split DNS for accessing internal resources or supporting clients.

Using split DNS with Tailscale has helped me manage access and support my clients by being able to use my internal DNS servers easily within the network without needing to have full tunnel connections. It has worked great for exposing particular applications to clients who are shared to particular nodes on my tailnet.

The best feature Tailscale offers is the ease of use for managing WireGuard and the fact that the key management is completely transparent, both for the WireGuard tunnel connection and for the SSH functionality.

The transparent key management and SSH functionality have benefited me by completely eliminating a manual, tedious step of needing to manage keys, which felt like a significant security risk that something could go wrong in the key management process. With Tailscale, it just happens and works.

Tailscale has positively impacted my organization and consulting work by making remote connections easy, significantly reducing the friction and making this very reliable, even behind difficult networks with CGNAT or other situations that make establishing connections difficult using other means.

I think if there was a streamlined mechanism to self-host the control plane, that would be a significant help in certain regulatory environments where customers feel unsure about having an external party control authentication onto the tailnet. Even with Tailnet Lock, there is still a concern that there are parts of the control plane that are opaque.

I have been using Tailscale since September of last year.

Tailscale is stable.

I have not hit the limits of Tailscale's scalability, which works well under automation and infrastructure as code. It is scalable from the perspective I am able to see.

I have not had much of a need to interact with customer support, but the only thing that I have used it for is to establish a custom OIDC identity provider, and the response felt quick and professional.

I previously used self-hosted WireGuard and OpenVPN connections because they had difficulty getting through in particular CGNAT connections, and that was the initial impetus for looking at Tailscale.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was straightforward and seemed fair for the value that the product provides.

My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

I do not have any metrics to share. Qualitatively, it definitely feels as though time troubleshooting connectivity has decreased.

Support issues related to connectivity have dropped by about half, and while I do not have an exact measure, the amount of time spent working on connectivity issues has decreased significantly.

I did not purchase Tailscale through the AWS Marketplace.

I also evaluated Twingate and ZeroTier before choosing Tailscale.

My advice to others looking into using Tailscale is to give it a try and make sure that it suits your needs, but overall, it feels like a stable product that greatly simplifies VPN and remote connectivity needs. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

I use Tailscale to share the branches in one network to make a site-to-site VPN. I have customers, and each customer has a server with too many branches. We need to access some devices that are not connected directly to the network, such as fingerprints that cannot have any firmware to install, for example, Tailscale agents. I need to connect the branch with the headquarter office and use Tailscale commands to reach the fingerprint through this VPN site-to-site.

This is the main purpose for using Tailscale until now, and I am searching for the other properties and features of Tailscale.

Tailscale is fast and easy to install. I can install Tailscale on any operating system, as it has a lot of OS versions and supports Linux, Mac, Android phones, Apple iOS, and Windows. This feature is suitable for my daily jobs and tasks.

Tailscale has a great interface that is friendly and acceptable. Tailscale fixed the problem with reaching devices such as fingerprints, and it is now the most preferred way to connect the site-to-site VPN when we have a customer with fingerprints.

Tailscale is good in troubleshooting, and it takes no time.

One of the most significant issues I faced is that in some countries, when I access my Tailscale account, it gives me more steps to verify and confirm, such as sending a message to my mobile and entering the code. I can see this is not helpful for the user experience compared to other alternatives.

Another issue is that when I use Tailscale with other alternatives such as Radmin and ZeroTier, it takes high priority and takes all the incoming connections, even if the other alternative has a different IP scope. It still takes the control and tends to cancel the other software as a VPN site-to-site.

Tailscale is stable, but sometimes with no more use, it sometimes needs to be activated again and again. For example, if I cannot connect or if the customer cannot connect to the network or use the tool, after one month, the customer gets lost or disconnected from the network and needs to verify again.

About one year.

Tailscale is stable, but sometimes with no more use, it sometimes needs to be activated again and again. For example, if I cannot connect or if the customer cannot connect to the network or use the tool, after one month, the customer gets lost or disconnected from the network and needs to verify again.

Tailscale is good, and I can add any number of branches I need until now.

Tailscale customer support is good. I can contact them and receive a fast response.

I still use other tools such as Radmin and ZeroTier. In previous years, I used to use Hamachi. They were good, but in some cases and some OS that does not support them, I switched to Tailscale.

Tailscale is a great solution that is fast, easy, and cheap.

Tailscale is cheap regarding other alternative site-to-site VPN solutions.

I evaluated Radmin and ZeroTier, and they were good.

Tailscale is good in performance, but with the previous issues I explained, I can give it just eight until it fixes these issues. I give Tailscale a rating of eight out of ten.

My main use case for Tailscale is accessing my home network when I'm outside. Essentially, it functions as a VPN.

I use Tailscale to access my home network by connecting to a main machine that runs Tailscale, which is separate from my home server. This allows me to connect to it even when my home server goes down, and it serves as a subnet router so I can access my home network through that single machine instead of connecting every single virtual machine to the same Tailscale network.

In my opinion, the best features Tailscale offers are its ease of use and quick setup. You essentially just need to run a command and you're connected to Tailscale network, and I love MagicDNS as well. Ease of use, MagicDNS, and the subnet router capabilities are very good.

I appreciate that MagicDNS helps me avoid memorizing IP addresses, and the subnet router allows me to use one device to connect to the entire network. For example, if I have a smart TV that cannot install Tailscale, I can access it through my subnet router machine. I set it up this way because I only have Tailscale installed on that entry point machine, which serves as the gateway to my network.

Tailscale has made managing and accessing my home network easier compared to using OpenVPN before. Previously, I had to manage everything myself, run the server, and keep it operational. If the server ever went down, I couldn't access my home network. With Tailscale, the situation is similar, but I don't have to expose any ports; I just connect a device to Tailscale servers. The main difference is that I don't have to run the VPN server since Tailscale does it for me, connecting my devices through their service. It's really great that I don't have to worry about all the setups.

I appreciate how their login system works. Tailscale services are fast, and since processing is done on the clients rather than the servers, they can focus on providing a good, reliable service. I don't think I've ever faced downtimes or connection issues from another country.

Tailscale does a great job for free-tier users, and the 100 device limit is very fair. However, I think improvements could be made in the support for UI clients, especially on Linux machines. In Windows and macOS, the UI support is good, but Linux is more customizable and has a unique setup, and I feel like I never have a good UI to interact with when using Linux desktops, which is unfortunate.

I've been working in my current field for about four years.

Tailscale is stable for me.

I feel Tailscale would handle adding more devices or users in the future easily, and I am confident of it. As a free-tier user, I have tested my limits, connecting the maximum amount of devices, and everything performed great. After that, I switched to subnet routing, allowing one device to forward traffic into my home network, which also circumvented device limits.

I never interacted with Tailscale's customer support because I never needed to. Tailscale is that reliable, and their documentation answers any questions I have.

I previously used OpenVPN before switching to Tailscale. I liked OpenVPN, but setting it up in a production environment was more of a learning experience rather than a complete permanent solution. You always find yourself wondering what improvements could be made. While OpenVPN is fine for production use, I'd say a managed service is more professional because it provides guarantees and reduces concerns. I switched to Tailscale out of curiosity, wanting to try WireGuard, and I was sold after just one to two minutes of setup.

Before choosing Tailscale, I evaluated other options, including OpenVPN. I was familiar with running my own VPN solution and considered using WireGuard directly on my home network or opting for Tailscale, which uses WireGuard in the background. I wanted something that worked correctly the first time, so I chose Tailscale while planning to tinker with WireGuard later.

My advice for others looking into using Tailscale is simple: just do it. Spin up a virtual machine, run the one-line command that Tailscale provides, and see how it works because it's so intuitive that nobody can mess it up.

I've seen a return on investment with Tailscale in terms of time saved and less maintenance required. I learned a lot from installing and maintaining OpenVPN, which sometimes required extensive hands-on configuration and problem-solving. With Tailscale, I set it up and forget it because it just works, allowing me to avoid worrying about the whole VPN aspect of my home network architecture. Every return on investment with Tailscale is time saved and reliability from the managed service.

I wouldn't say I have an experience with pricing, setup costs, or licensing because I use the free tier. My needs have never exceeded the free tier as I am the single maintainer of my home network and server, which is beneficial.

I think Tailscale is an awesome product; I use it every day and have it implemented in my home network. As long as the free tier stays the same, I don't see myself switching from it.