ztncui VS nebula-mesh-admin

> they actively went after third party coordination servers, wherenas I hear headscale mentioned by tailscale employees all the time.

ZeroTier founder here. We never did anything remotely like that, so I'm curious about where you heard that.

We did adjust our licensing to counter people attempting to take the product, slap their own name on it, and monetize it without supporting us, but we are strongly considering going back to a more liberal license in the near future. In any case we didn't "go after" anyone, just limited commercial closed source use in a manner not unlike the AGPL. We never filed any kind of lawsuits about this or anything.

We also regularly promote third party open source products like this:

https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui

We've never had an issue with non-commercial or FOSS usage.

If you have a VPN somewhere, you could also try Nebula (https://www.defined.net/nebula/) or self-host the management server for Tailscale (https://github.com/juanfont/headscale) or zerotier (https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui).

Disadvantages: Limited to 50 hosts (you can host your own ZeroTier Controller using Ztncui for unlimited hosts: https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui)

You can self host a controller of adding/removing devices and all ( https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui ), but it has an upstream connection to their managed services, it’s how the apps and all keep working.

There are a couple of Options out there that make controlling the controller easier, either through WEB Guis: https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui https://github.com/dec0dOS/zero-ui

Every zerotier node ships with the CLI network controller, but someone wrote a simple GUI for it and that is on docker.

https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui

ZeroUI implements controller-specific workarounds that address some existing [issues](https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/issues/859). ZTNCUI [does not](https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui/issues/63).

You can host your own authorization server. https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui

Nebula is great - super simple to set up and get started if you have a VM to use as a lighthouse. Lots of cloud providers free tiers are have enough resources to host a lighthouse as well.

Certificate management is its one weakness at the moment. There are a growing number of projects floating around attempting to solve that though:

* https://github.com/unreality/nebula-mesh-admin

As other have suggested, Nebula (https://github.com/slackhq/nebula) is pretty elegant. It has groups-based access built in which is extremely convenient.

You can bolt-on SSO fairly easily - just create a certificate signing service. I created https://github.com/unreality/nebula-mesh-admin in a weekend, so its fairly easy to add a SSO flow in.