Software Alternatives & Reviews

Netmaker VS Headscale

Compare Netmaker VS Headscale and see what are their differences

Netmaker

Netmaker automates mesh VPN's and software-defined networks using WireGuard.

Headscale

An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server
  • Netmaker Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-12

  • Headscale Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20

Netmaker

Categories
  • Cloud Infrastructure
  • Cloud Management
  • Networking
  • VPN
Website netmaker.io  
Pricing URL Official Netmaker Pricing  
Details $freemium

Headscale

Categories
  • VPN
  • Cloud VPN
  • Security & Privacy
  • Localhost Tools
Website github.com  
Pricing URL-
Details $-

Netmaker videos

免费开源的组网神器NetMaker,wireguard协议LAN to LAN对等网络

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Netmaker v0.2 - Site to Site and Gateway over WireGuard Tutorial
  • Review - Netmaker - A powerful, open source, self hosted, GUI for setting up Wireguard networks and VPNs.
  • Review - Automated Failover / Relay for WireGuard ® Networks with Netmaker EE

Headscale videos

Testing out headscale locally for homelab setup

More videos:

  • Review - Tutorial: Using Tailscale Overlay Network VPN with the Self Hosted Headscale Controller

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Netmaker and Headscale)
VPN
50 50%
50% 50
Cloud Infrastructure
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud VPN
37 37%
63% 63
Security & Privacy
46 46%
54% 54

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Netmaker and Headscale.

What makes your product unique?

Netmaker's answer

  1. Netmaker uses kernel WireGuard, which makes it way faster and more modern than the alternatives.
  2. Netmaker can also be fully "self-hosted" so you don't have to rely on a 3rd party with potential access to your sensitive data. 3 Netmaker creates a Mesh VPN, which is like the best of software-defined networking, zero trust, and VPNs all combined into one.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Netmaker's answer

Netmaker is faster, more configurable, cheaper, and can be fully-self hosted. With Netmaker, you're in control.

How would you describe your primary audience?

Netmaker's answer

IT admins, sysadmins, DevOps, InfraOps, platform engineers, and developers.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Netmaker's answer

WireGuard, Golang, and Docker.

User comments

Share your experience with using Netmaker and Headscale. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Netmaker should be more popular than Headscale. It has been mentiond 63 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Netmaker mentions (63)

  • PrivateVPN is horrible. Don't do it.
    With Netmaker, you can have greater control and customization by assigning dedicated IP addresses to specific nodes within your network. I just stumble upon it yesterday, check it out. Source: 9 months ago
  • Benefit of connect device under NAT to VPN network
    These days, I'm trying to deploy full mesh VPN network with netmaker. It is really easy to use and manage. However there are something makes me confused. Source: 9 months ago
  • Web based self service CA for OpenVPN
    If a TCP based protocol isn't an absolute must have, I'd ditch OpenVPN for Wireguard with some kind of management overlay. e.g netmaker. Source: 10 months ago
  • Tailscale increased free plan user limit form 1 to 3 and device cap to 100 also... unlimited subnets
    Do the net maker https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker worth trying to use instead of Tailscale? Tailscale is good, but I can watch YouTube over Wi-Fi in another country, but when I try to use Jellyfin to watch movies it’s not loading well. Source: 11 months ago
  • Tips & Tricks for Productivity with Android E-Ink Devices (Obsidian, Syncthing, Weylus, RustDesk, Termux, KDE Connect, ZeroTier)
    Very relatable! At first, I struggled for days trying to make Netmaker or Innernet functional for my personal home server (Raspberry Pi behind multiple routers). But then I stumbled upon ZeroTier, and everything worked seamlessly within a couple of hours. Tailscale was actually the next one on my list because I heard many positive things about it over at r/selfhosted (especially about headscale). However, I did... Source: 11 months ago
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Headscale mentions (41)

  • Securely Accessing Private AWS Resources from GitHub Actions with TailScale
    One more thing, you can host Tailscale Control Server yourself if you want, which is a plus. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • A word of caution about Tailscale
    Https://github.com/juanfont/headscale not to mention but Tailscale has a very good culture, I’m sure they would give notice if they pull the rug. There are also many alternatives such as Zerotier and more are showing up every day and open source options. Source: 3 months ago
  • Connecting several hundreds IoT (raspberry pi's) devices with a VPN
    How about self-hosted Tailscale, known as Headscale. Source: 3 months ago
  • Mullvad on Tailscale: Privately browse the web
    You can run your own "head scale" control server and use their clients with it: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale Requires a lot more setup, but it is an option. I've been self-hosting headscale for some time and it is quite stable. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Admin-Friendly Mesh VPN with WireGuard?
    After browsing through, I've noticed that three options seem to be gaining traction: Netmaker, wg-easy, and headscale. I'm curious to know if these solutions are interchangeable, and if there are specific reasons to choose one over the others. I'd also like to understand if they are complete stacks, meaning, once set up, could I easily replace one admin GUI with another, or would I need to tear down and rebuild... Source: 7 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Netmaker and Headscale, you can also consider the following products

TailScale - Private networks made easy Connect all your devices using WireGuard, without the hassle. Tailscale makes it as easy as installing an app and signing in.

ZeroTier - Extremely simple P2P Encrypted VPN

NetBird - Connect your devices into a single secure private WireGuard®-based mesh network with SSO/MFA and manage access with just a few clicks.

WireGuard - Fast, Modern, Secure VPN Tunnel

Tinc VPN - tinc is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) daemon that uses tunnelling and encryption to create a...

zrok - Next-generation sharing platform built on top of OpenZiti