First impressions: NetBird

I’ve been a Tailscale user for almost five years. Today, I stumbled across NetBird again and largely replaced Tailscale with it.

Why?

For one, the reverse proxy feature: Setting up public services is much easier with it compared to Tailscale Funnel. It lets you use a custom domain or even multiple ones. It’s much easier to configure via the web UI. And it lets you configure different authentication options in front of the services. Sure, it’s a pretty new feature, and there’s still one use case I have for Tailscale Funnel (testing ACME to request TLS certificates with GoBlog) that isn’t working yet with NetBird (at least what I tried).

Second, NetBird is much more open about self-hosting. While I haven’t tried that yet (I might once I am more familiar with NetBird in general), I saw they published multiple YouTube videos or blog posts about it. Tailscale required Headscale for self-hosting, but that’s not an official tool.

Third, you can log in with email and password and are not bound to some third-party identity provider!

Fourth, it’s a European company based in Berlin.

While NetBird doesn’t feel as polished in some areas as Tailscale, it has more configuration options here and there. It’s possible to apply the DNS configuration only on a certain set of devices. Or set the port to use on the DNS server.

The Android app doesn’t look that great, but I found an alternative: JetBird.

I will keep Tailscale for now for the mentioned Funnel feature I sometimes use. Or because the exit nodes can be chosen, activated, and deactivated from the client. But to connect to my remote servers or connect to home, I will now use NetBird.

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