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Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

narrowlink.com

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Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#31

Post by brutal_boi »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #16

Definitely interested in this, however: >Narrowlink uses a centralized gateway that clients and agents connect to over HTTP/S protocols Tunneling TCP over TCP will undoubtedly result in poor network performance. This is why WireGuard is UDP-only.

Tailsacle also has a series of performance optimization and wireguard testing blog posts; considering some of their late offload additions, and even though they use userspace wg, I find it hard to believe they are nowhere in the same perf ballpark, but I could be entirely wrong here...

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#33

Post by Joker_vD »

zhaoweny wrote: post #19

Seems Narrowlink is tunneling at socket level; while Tailscale is tunneling at network / IP level. I think they are comparing apple to orange here.

And we all know apples and oranges are incompatible in every single way. Even their physical dimensions or prices can't be meaningfully compared!

Seriously though: both of those products aim to provide secure tunnelling/network connectivity. They do it differently, which leads to different trade-offs including, among other things, at which level the OS network stack is intercepted. All of those things can be meaningfully compared (e.g., "do I need my favourite application Z to explicitly support and be configured to use a HTTP/SOCKS-proxy or will it 'just work'™?" — Tor and OpenVPN give two different answers).

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#34

Post by lmeyerov »

bootsmann wrote: post #3

This article is classic SEO fluff right? The Q&A style answering exactly the type of questions that people comparing the two would write into google search.

I found it useful - we have been considering tailscale for part of our post-VPN strategy, and as tailscale markets successfully there, the direct comparison helps. That they were fair about the OSS & centralization comparisons without explicitly punching up was also great for trust building - good job whoever wrote that.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#35

Post by dsissitka »

pawelduda wrote: post #21
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used Nebula to build a cross-cloud Nomad cluster, very underrated and does 99% of what you'd want from Tailscale.

No Android support though, instant dealbreaker for me. I use tailscale and termux to SSH into my devices, or to access my HomeAssistant from anywhere EDIT: my bad, they have an Android client

What doesn't support Android? Nebula has an Android client:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.defined.mo...

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#36

Post by wmf »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #29
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #16

Definitely interested in this, however: >Narrowlink uses a centralized gateway that clients and agents connect to over HTTP/S protocols Tunneling TCP over TCP will undoubtedly result in poor network performance. This is why WireGuard is UDP-only.

Isn't SOCKS typically tunneling TCP over TCP? SOCKS has been rock solid for me And on the other hand, HTTP/S is often using UDP for the transport now

No, because SOCKS terminates the "inner" TCP connection at the proxy.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#37

Post by predictabl3 »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #24

> Narrowlink and Tailscale are two open source solutions with different architectures that enable secure remote access and connectivity across networks. A nitpick, but ironically I think they're being generous to Tailscale there. Tailscale isn't really "open source" - or at least not without heavy qualification. I'm not an open source zealot by any means but that line just seems a little misleading. The clients are p…

> significant part of the value proposition of Tailscale is their very well designed web UI which makes managing their Wireguard based networks very user friendly.

I think this is an opinion. I don't use the tags/rules, and I literally only use their website to complete the oauth flow to auth a new client. Headscale is a perfectly functional replacement of Tailscale for me.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#39

Post by skybrian »

bootsmann wrote: post #3

This article is classic SEO fluff right? The Q&A style answering exactly the type of questions that people comparing the two would write into google search.

It’s a little verbose but I’m in favor of people writing these sort of comparisons, and a Q&A format is fine. People writing more FAQ’s seems like a mostly positive side effect of SEO, if they’re accurate.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#40

Post by Joker_vD »

notatoad wrote: post #27
zhaoweny wrote: post #19

Seems Narrowlink is tunneling at socket level; while Tailscale is tunneling at network / IP level. I think they are comparing apple to orange here.

comparing apples to oranges is legitimately a good analogy here, just not in the idiomatic way people usually mean it. apples and oranges are pretty comprable. they are different things, but serve the same purpose and are often used interchangeably. it's perfectly reasonable to compare those two things.

Yeah, the usual way this analogy is meant to be understood always pissed me off. Of course you can compare them: apples are better for making an apple pie than oranges; apples are cheaper and less squishy during transportation; oranges have more vitamin C; apples have more bio-available iron; oranges (subjectively) are tastier and less sour; etc.
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