I use Tailscale to connect from outside my local network. I set it up on my server and on multiple clients, including my smartphone (iPhone), laptop, MacBook, and TVs, as well as my parents' TVs which are far from my home. Basically, all the devices that I use to connect to my server.

For the most part, I use it to connect to my media server, which contains a collection of media. I also use it as a DNS server. Since my server has DNS, it spreads to all the devices which I am connected to.

I also use it to connect via SSH to start other clients via Wake-on-LAN. I have been using it every day since June 2025, and it has never given me a problem. I also contacted support for some questions, and the support was great. I am actually really impressed by the product and its support.

The features that I love the most are the simplicity of setting it up. I can do it in about two minutes. I just download the app on the client, use a QR code or a key, and set it up. Another feature is Tailnet, which allows me to manage the devices and organize them.

Because I have been using it since June 2025 and never used it before, coming from a very basic level of knowledge, it was really simple to learn and set up. For me, using Tailscale on all my devices is a definite choice.

I do not think there is anything that I wish would have been better because, honestly, for my use case, it has everything I need. I read that people complain about the maximum number of users that can use it under one account, but that is not my use case. For my use case, it has nothing more that I need. It has everything, and it is perfect for my use case.

I have been using Tailscale since I built my home server, which was in June 2025.

Tailscale is really stable.

Until now, with 20 devices, I still have not encountered any limitation. There is no limitation for now.

I only used customer support one time to ask a question that I do not remember, honestly, but the customer support is really great since they responded really quickly and provided very explanatory answers.

At my home, I never used any other service, but in my previous job, I used OpenVPN. However, it was already set up. I did not know how to set it up. It was a bit more problematic because it had connection problems, but I do not have much experience to analyze and talk about it.

Setting up a Tailscale environment took me maybe 10 minutes on the server and two minutes for every device. With about 20 devices, I set up all my environments in about an hour. If I had to use another VPN service, for example WireGuard, I can assume that it would have taken me far more than an hour, something like two hours at least. That is double the time, and Tailscale takes half the time to set up.

We were really engaged with this product. We talked about everything in my opinion, so I do not think there is anything that I would like to add to Tailscale.

As I said, I only use the basic license, so I cannot give any metrics on ROI. But if I had to think about a company or an organization that uses it, I would think that it surely gives a good ROI since it is really a good application and a good service.

Until now, all costs have been free. I never used a license. I never purchased or bought anything more than the basic free license.

I evaluated WireGuard, which I know is the base of Tailscale, but I chose Tailscale since it is more simple, as I said during this interview. That is the main and only reason I chose Tailscale over WireGuard bare metal.

For my use case, these are the main features that I use and have discovered so far. I do not think I have anything more to add in this area.

I would say to use it because, in my case, it really helped my organization with my setup. I would really suggest people use Tailscale if they ask me. I rate this product a 9.

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.

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.

We have been using Tailscale for about four or five months, and we have been using it from the beginning.

For our main use case, we use Tailscale because it creates a peer-to-peer VPN mesh where we host our AWS infrastructure behind it, so the general web cannot directly access it. It is only accessible from authorized systems, such as the one that I have.

A specific example of how we use Tailscale for this peer-to-peer VPN mesh in my daily work is that the entirety of our AWS infrastructure and systems that we use to build at Flyra are behind a private VPN that is accessible using Tailscale. The general web cannot access it, so we ensure that there is nothing unauthorized accessing our servers. Authorized and recognized systems are only able to access the infrastructure and the resources that we want restricted, and that is where Tailscale comes in.

About my main use case, I am fully aware that it is end-to-end encrypted. We maintain access using ACLs, which allows us to fine-tune the fine-grained rules for who can connect and to what.

The best features Tailscale offers are highlighted by the fact that setting up Tailscale was straightforward, at least once you are following the documentation and the guides. The security is valuable, as there are many providers available, but Tailscale fulfills the requirements that we had, allowing us to access and expose internal apps without exposing them to the general internet. The complex site-to-site connections are replaced using VPNs, and we can SSH into our remote desktops or SSH into our EC2 machines in our AWS regions in a secure way.

About the features that make Tailscale stand out for me, with access control lists, we can fine-grain what can be accessed and by whom. It solved our base use case, which is keeping our secured infrastructure behind a private VPN, and that is why we started using it in the first place.

Tailscale has had more positive impacts on my organization regarding security.

Regarding how Tailscale can be improved, I think for free users, there are some limited options. However, we have a paid policy, so we pay Tailscale every month. At some point, we may want to host our own coordination servers, which Tailscale does not have right now. However, it is just a general consideration, and I doubt that we will have that problem soon.

Regarding the needed improvements for paid users, I think things are acceptable. The limits could be higher for free users, and that is all.

I have been a software developer for about two years, and that represents full-time experience.

My advice to others looking into using Tailscale is that if there is a use case where you want to secure your private EC2 instances, the workflows, your Git repositories, and sensitive data, Docker images, Maven builds, Gradle builds, and so forth, behind and away from the general internet and onto your private cloud, Tailscale can act as that link, allowing you access to that private information from authorized systems while also fine-graining that control. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.