pivpn VS tailscale

Compare pivpn vs tailscale and see what are their differences.

tailscale

The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA. (by tailscale)
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pivpn tailscale
311 1,037
7,521 22,146
1.3% 4.7%
5.0 9.9
about 1 month ago 2 days ago
Shell Go
MIT License BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pivpn

Posts with mentions or reviews of pivpn. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-06.

tailscale

Posts with mentions or reviews of tailscale. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-04-16.
  • Optimizing My Dev Workflow in 2025
    7 projects | dev.to | 16 Apr 2025
    I had 2 old laptops sitting around, both 10 years old. I turned both into a home server. Installed Ubuntu Server, set up Docker, and now I run all my containers remotely. With Tailscale, I can securely connect to it like it's on the same network. This way, my MacBook doesn't have to run MongoDB, Redis, or RabbitMQ anymore. That alone freed up a lot of memory. I can even run other services like HomeAssistant, MailHog, Immich, etc.
  • Again self-hosting! on k3s
    4 projects | dev.to | 15 Apr 2025
    Then I wanted to add Tailscle which besides being a "best in class VPN" for the homelabbers, allows you to add k8s services directly into your tailnet. What does it mean? The Tailscale operator allows you to access your k8s applications only when you are logged into your private network (tailnet), with the usage of your domain for ended with ts.net. You can configure it in two ways on the resource side, with ingress or with service annotation.
  • An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Apr 2025
    here's the GitHub issue tracking the problem:

    https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/3363

  • Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Apr 2025
    We actually have that nowadays... the config file support to tailscaled, as Irbe mentioned on the bug Jan 2024: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1412#issuecomm...
  • Tailscale Enterprise Plan 9 Support
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Apr 2025
  • Ask HN: What is the most secure way of baby monitoring?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Mar 2025
    I dunno if the CIA would trust them but I like Amcrest cameras

    https://amcrest.com/

    because they have a wide range of different price points and capabilities. Use these with software like

    https://zoneminder.com/

    which you could run on a cheap Linux box. For secure access use

    https://tailscale.com/

  • DiceDB
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Mar 2025
    Vertical scaling this language also gets into painful territory quite often, I’ve had to workaround this problem before but never with a thing that felt like this: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/blob/main/syncs/shard...
  • ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Feb 2025
    Hmm, yes, I think you’re right. Tailscale does handle the connection here, not Wireguard.

    I’ve digged into it a bit and I believe it first connects over a relay, then the devices try to find a more optimal route. So for LAN, they would exchange their local IPs and try to connect over those. If they are indeed on the same LAN, they connect directly: https://tailscale.com/kb/1257/connection-types

    This is not without issues, however: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/7206

  • 3 Best Ngrok Alternatives
    2 projects | dev.to | 7 Feb 2025
    Tailscale is a tunneling platform built on open-source code. DevZero and other companies leverage a handful of Tailscale’s source components in their own development environments. Why? Because being open-source means that Tailscale’s software/code is much easier to understand and manipulate, more cost-efficient, and more transparent. Tailscale takes pride in this.
  • How I Use Home Assistant in 2025
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2025
    Just put tailscale [1] on all of your devices and forget about the problem. It may be technically a vpn but it's much easier to use.

    [1] https://tailscale.com/

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pivpn and tailscale you can also consider the following projects:

dnscrypt-proxy - dnscrypt-proxy 2 - A flexible DNS proxy, with support for encrypted DNS protocols.

netbird - Connect your devices into a secure WireGuard®-based overlay network with SSO, MFA and granular access controls.

wg-easy - The easiest way to run WireGuard VPN + Web-based Admin UI.

headscale - An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server

dockovpn - 🔐 Out of the box stateless openvpn-server docker image which starts in less than 2 seconds

AdGuardHome - Network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server

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InfluxDB high-performance time series database
Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data to power real-time intelligent systems.
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